old antennae, the rusted drive shafts of decades-dead jet turbines were hammered into the surfaces of the roofs. Secured to these were lengths of rotting rope, pilfered from the docks. Flattened cans of krill, backs of discarded computer terminals and insulation tiles from L5 shuttles filled the gaps between rough planks to form walkways over the street, a hundred feet below.
The bridges did not look all that secure, but the Pirhanas were closing in. Jonny stepped onto the closest walkway and hurried across. The support ropes stretched and tightened as things cracked and shifted under his feet.
He leaped off onto the adjoining roof. The bridge strained behind him, weighed down by the gang. The fat man was still in front, holding the pipe before him. Jonny moved in circles around the roof, frantic for something to throw. He knew that if he used his gun, Zamora's man would find him and all this would have been for nothing. In the end, he decided that the situation did not cry out for subtlety. Fumbling in the folds of his tunic, he pulled out the sweat-soaked Futukoro and waved it in the face of the fat man, who pulled up short at the sight of the gun. The Pirhanas bunched up behind him, growing silent.
'That's it!' Jonny shouted. No more games. The first one who moves is meat for the others.
It was rubbish and he knew it, but it sometimes worked, as it seemed to be working now. The Pirhanas, including the fat man, remained where they were. They stared at Jonny with empty, feral eyes.
Sentiment had always been Jonny's undoing. At heart, all cops are romantic slobs and ex-cops are worse. A terrible wave of sorrow overcame his fear as he backed away from the pathetic group. They were defectives, not unlike the losers and one-percenters that he knew, that he was a part of. Jonny scanned the faces of the crowd, wondering if whatever errant gene that had sent them out here to the wilds was present in his blood. He regarded them with a certain awe.
From behind, a brick fell and shattered hollowly. Jonny turned quickly, keeping the gun on the fat man. Dozens of Pirhanas had crowded onto the other roofs, pipes and heavy connecting rods in their hands. Many grinned, showing sharp, stained teeth. Jonny was surrounded.
He shuffled to the edge of the roof, turning in slow circles, trying to cover himself in all directions. When Jonny reached the fire escape, the bridges were packed with Pirhanas. When he stepped onto the ladder, a few were moving toward him across the roof.
When he was straddling the wall, the fat man threw his pipe and screamed, charging him.
Jonny managed to duck the pipe and dropped over the edge of the wall, landing hard on the fire escape platform. He rolled onto his back and pointed his Futukoro. Too late. The Pirhanas were over him, pelting him with pipes and stones. But even under that hail of debris, Jonny could not bring himself to kill any of them. He settled for spraying three sides of the sky with bullets.
The Pirhanas fell back, unaware of Jonny's good intentions.
With his gun straight up, Jonny squeezed off a few more rounds and clattered down the steps.
When he hit the ground, he hung in the shadows, pressing himself tight against the building, waiting for the sounds of pursuit.
But there were none. Jonny breathed through his mouth, swallowing great gobs of hot, wet air.
He was in a blind alley; at the far end lay a vacant lot dotted with discarded dressing dummies and barbed wire rolls. Jonny remained against the building, feeling it solid against his back. He checked the rounds left in his gun and carefully slid down the wall toward the alley's mouth.
He did not stand a chance.
A gleeful cry echoed from above. Jonny looked up just in time to see the junk raining down on him: pipes, bottles, jet canopies and electronic components, all the technological refuse of the city. He leaped and rolled, groaning at a sharp pain in his shoulder.
The first wave of junk crashed behind him. The second wave caught him in the open with nowhere to hide. Compassion vanished.
Hunkering down behind a dressing dummy, he opened fire at the roof, his bullets chewing the head off a sexless stone cherub. Its companions made no comment and the Pirhanas, who knew better than to stand close to the edge, just laughed at him. Jonny remained low in the dirt, cursing himself for not having blown a few of them away when he had the chance.
'DO NOT MOVE. STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE,' commanded a bland, amplified voice.
The Committee hovercar roared by suddenly, like an angry metal wasp- all sleek and deadly- its belly lights casting angry fingers of brilliance over the empty buildings. Shadows moved like a year of nightmares across deserted storefronts. Dust and grit billowed from the roof into the alley, filling it with smoky phantoms.
Jonny coughed, trying to clear his throat. The clamor on the roof picked up as the Pirhanas turned their anger toward the hovercar, pelting it with junk. Jonny took the opportunity to move into the street. His shadow circled him like a nervous cat, then appeared in a dozen places at once- thin and diffuse.
Crouching by a gutted lamp post, Jonny found a sewer grating and gave it a tug. By rocking it back and forth, he worked the grating loose and pulled it free. Peering down to see if the way was clear, a sudden attack of vertigo tilted the street toward the dark hole. Jonny grabbed the lamp post, fighting to keep his balance, and turned back toward the hotel.
Overhead, the hovercar was hanging in the air like a patient predator, waiting for an opening. Abruptly, a mechanical whine filled the air. Jonny squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears as the pacifiers kicked in.
The fighting on the roof died away as, much too late, the Pirhanas realized what was happening. They stood as one, staring at the whirling pattern of lights, paralyzed and helpless.
Jonny decided that it was time to find the Croakers. He slid quietly into the sewer and pulled the grating closed.
The sewers were the lichen-slicked relics of another time, a means of concealment as old as revolution itself. The Croakers took to them soon after the shoot-on-sight orders became official policy with the Committee. The Croakers were outlaws, anarchists and physicians mainly, treating diseases that officially did not exist or could not be diagnosed without authority of the local medical boards. Their roots extended back to the early days of the century when the first doctors went underground, destroying the records of patients with AIDS and certain new strains of hepatitis, treating these patients (the new untouchable' caste) in the black clinics hastily thrown together with whatever those original rebels could carry with them.
Other doctors, mostly young ones back from the Lunar Border Wars, frustrated by the impenetrable bureaucracy and government seizures of their patient records, joined them. It took only a few years for the medical community to split into two distinct camps: those doctors who remained above ground, working with the powers that be, and those who walked away from all that, joining the other gangs of Los Angeles in constructing their own micro-society beyond the boundaries of conventional law.
Jonny had been a supplier and occasional courier to the Croakers and he liked them, despite their revolutionary proselytizing. He cringed when one of them called him 'brother', but he felt a silly pride at being associated with them. That was also why he remained suspicious of them. To be otherwise would demand a response that he was not prepared to give, was still not sure of. It implied certain ties, a common heritage, and that made him nervous.
The sewers, laced within the body of the city, were the corroded veins of a sick addict, shut down from age and abuse. The only things that moved in them were alien, looking for a way out.
Jonny stood at the bottom of a ladder of steel rungs embedded in a stone wall. Knee deep in black water, the floor sucked at his legs.
The air was thick with stagnancy; corrupt, buzzing with mosquitoes. They tickled his face, covering his eyes and hands. They stung him until he swung out blindly at the curtain of pests, fighting back an overpowering sense of his own death. But death was not it, not exactly. It was more a formless sense of great anxiety, a feeling that he had done something terribly wrong and that if he could just remember what it was and fix it, everything would be all right.
Jonny knew a little about the layout of the sewers, but he did not know the location of the Croakers' secret tunnels. Since all directions were the same in the dark, he started moving straight ahead, into a faint, sticky breeze. Very soon, Jonny realized that he was no longer moving through absolute darkness.
He could see the mosquitoes. They seemed to be crawling over a flat two-dimensional background; a trick of the strange light that seemed to fill the tunnel. The lichen on the walls were glowing a weak green. When he ran his fingers over the damp stones of the wall, he left a black trail where the lichen peeled off. His fingers glowed with
