was nothing unusual; hunts were the norm rather than the exception. But she had also — after considerable persuasion — revealed the likely site for the bloody revelry. There was a lot riding on it, the failure to kill me having ruined a perfectly good night’s entertainment for the paying voyeurs who followed each chase.
‘I’ll tell you where it is,’ she had said. ‘Only on the grounds that you use that information to keep away from it. Is that understood? I saved you once, Tanner Mirabel, but then you betrayed my trust. That hurt. It doesn’t particularly dispose me towards helping you a second time.’
‘You know what I’ll do with that information, Zebra.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do. At least you haven’t lied to me, I’ll give you that. You really are a man of your word, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not all that you think I am, Zebra.’ I felt I owed her that, if she had not already worked that part out for herself.
She had told me the sector that had been cleared for the chase. The subject, she said, had already been acquired and equipped with an implant — sometimes they made several raids on a given night, and kept the victims asleep until a gaming slot arose.
‘Does anyone ever escape, Zebra?’
‘You did, Tanner.’
‘No, I mean, really escape, without being helped by the sabs. Does that happen?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes — maybe more often than you’d think. Not because the hunted manage to outwit the chasers, but because the organisers occasionally allow it. Otherwise, it would get boring, wouldn’t it?’
‘Boring?’
‘There’d be no element of chance. The Canopy would always win.’
‘That certainly wouldn’t do,’ I said.
I watched them creep through the rain now, guns swept ahead of them, their masked faces darting from side to side, examining every nook and cranny. The target must have been dropped in this zone a few minutes before, quietly, perhaps not even fully awake, like the naked man in the white-walled room, slowly coming to his senses to realise that he was sharing his confines with something unspeakable.
There were two women and two men, and as they came closer I saw that their masks were a combination of theatrical decoration and practicality. The two women both wore cat masks: long tapering feline eyeslits packed with specialised lenses. Their gloves were clawed, and when their black, high-backed cloaks parted, I saw that their clothes were patterned in tiger stripes and leopard spots. Then I realised that they were not clothes at all, but furred synthetic skin, and that those clawed gloves were not gloves but unsheathed hands. One of the women grinned, flashing jewelled fangs, sharing a cruel joke with her friends. The men were not so ostentatiously transformed, their animal personae derived solely from their costumes. The nearest man had a bear’s head, his own face peering from under the bear’s upper jaw. His companion’s face sported two ugly, faceted insect eyes which constantly caught and refracted the light of the suspended Canopy.
I waited until they were twenty metres from my place of hiding, then made my move, sprinting across their path in a low, crablike crouch, convinced that none of them would get their weapons onto me in time. I was right, although they were better than I had thought they would be, scything the water behind my heels, but not quite reaching me until I had found shelter on the other side of the street.
‘It’s not him,’ I heard one of them say, probably one of the women. ‘He’s not meant to be here!’
‘Whoever it was needs a good shooting, that’s all I know. Fan out; we’ll get the little shit.’
‘I’m telling you, it isn’t him! He should be three blocks south — and even if it was him, why would he leave shelter?’
‘We were about to find him, that’s why.’
‘He was too fast. Mulch aren’t usually so fast.’
‘So you’ve got a challenge. You complaining?’
I risked a view around the edge of my protective niche. A bolt of lightning had chosen that moment to strike; they were framed for me in complete clarity.
‘I just saw him!’ I heard the other woman shout, and now I heard the whine of an energy-discharge, followed by a burst of projectile weapons fire farting across the night.
‘There’s something funny with his eyes,’ the first woman said. ‘They were glowing in his face!’
‘Now you’re getting spooked, Chanterelle.’ It was the voice of one of the men, maybe the ursine one, very close now. I still held the mental image of them in my mind, burned into my memory, but I ran the image forward in my head, allowing them to walk to where I now knew they would be, like actors following stage instructions. Then I moved from my cover, squeezing off three shots, three precise squeaks from the gun, barely having to re-aim, since the view I saw agreed so well with the image in my head. I shot low, dropping three of the four with shots to the thigh, deliberately aiming wide with the last one, and then swung myself back behind the wall.
You don’t take a thigh shot and keep standing. Maybe it was my imagination, but I think I heard three separate splashes as they impacted with the water. It was rather hard to tell, since the other thing you seldom do after you’ve taken a thigh shot is remain silent. The wound I had taken the night before had been reasonably painless by comparison, executed with precision, by a duelling beam-weapon with a very narrow spread. Even so, I hadn’t exactly enjoyed the experience.
My gamble was that the three on the ground were essentially out of play, unable to aim their weapons even if they hadn’t dropped them out of reach. They might try to fire a few pot-shots in my general direction, but — like the woman who had shot me in the leg — they were not using the kinds of weapon which forgave inaccuracy. As for the fourth, she figured in my plans, which was why she wasn’t currently emptying her soul into a puddle of warm rain.
I stepped out of cover, making sure my gun was conspicuous — no mean feat, given its size, and I began to wish I also had Zebra’s huge club of a rifle for moral support.
‘S… stop,’ the woman who was standing said. ‘Stop, or I’ll drop you.’
She was twelve to fifteen metres from me, her weapon still trained in roughly my direction: Miss Leopardskin with the spotted cat’s-eye mask, only now her saunter had lost most of its cattiness.
‘Put down the toy,’ I said. ‘Or I put it down for you.’
If she’d stopped to contemplate the wounds I’d inflicted on her whimpering friends, it might have occurred to her that I was a more than averagely good shot and therefore capable of doing exactly what I said. But evidently she wasn’t the contemplative type, because what she did was to minutely raise the angle of her gun, and I watched her supporting forearm tense as if in anticipation of the recoil from the shot.
So I fired first, and her gun went spinning out of her hand with a chime of ricocheting ice-slugs. She made a little canine yelp, hastily examining her hand to check that she still had all her fingers.
I was insulted. Who did she think I was, some kind of amateur?
‘Good,’ I said. ‘You’ve dropped it. How wise; it’ll save me putting a slug through your brachial nerve. Now step away from your pisspoor excuses for friends and start walking back towards the vehicle.’
‘They’re hurt, you bastard.’
‘Look on the bright side. They could be dead.’ And they would be too, I thought, if they didn’t reach help in the reasonably imminent future. The water around them was already assuming an ominous cherry-coloured complexion, in what little light there remained. ‘Do what I told you,’ I said. ‘Walk towards the cable-car and we’ll take it from there. You can call for help once we’re airborne. Of course, if they’re very lucky, someone from the Mulch may get to them first.’
‘You piece of shit,’ she said. ‘Whoever you are.’
Dodging my gun between the woman and her moaning friends, I trudged between the bodies, examining them out of the corner of my eye. ‘Hope none of them have implants,’ I said. ‘Because I hear the Mulch people like to harvest, and I’m not sure they’re too particular about going through paperwork first.’
‘You piece of shit.’
‘Why are you so upset with me, just because I had the nerve to fight back?’
‘You’re not the target,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the target.’
‘Who are you, incidentally?’ I tried to remember the one name I had heard the hunting quartet use. ‘Chanterelle? Is that your name? Very aristocratic. I bet your family was high in the Demarchy before the Belle
