“Yeah, I’m sure it is.” Kugara looked up from the shreds of foam in her glass and asked him, “But if you had a choice, would you be walking into this?”
“No.”
“Damn straight.” She looked over at the bar. “I think it’s time for a second round.”
She never asked him why he had no choice in the matter, or why he had a prosthetic arm, or why a scion of House Rajasthan had deigned to prostitute his skills as a mercenary on Bakunin. He returned the favor.
By the end of the third round, and his third pitcher, Nickolai finally felt a comfortable softening of the edges of his perception. Even before coming to Bakunin, he hadn’t been much of a social drinker. What little alcohol he consumed was usually ceremonial, toasting saints, fellow warriors, or the person of the sovereign. He was somewhat surprised at how he enjoyed being comfortable with another person, whoever it was.
That might have been why it took him that long to notice their shadow. A trio of men, who had entered some time after he and Kugara had arrived, sat at a corner booth that had a good view of Nickolai’s table. They weren’t obviously watching them, but they also weren’t doing much drinking, or laughing, or talking. The trio might be in civilian clothes, but Nickolai was sensitive to motion and body language, and even out of the corner of his eye he could tell they had body armor restricting their movements under the loose overalls they wore.
Without moving his gaze from Kugara, he cycled though his new spectral sensitivities. When he downshifted the spectrum toward the infrared, he could see square hot spots on their belts that were most likely active Emerson field generators.
The body armor could be innocent, insofar as anything was innocent in the violent mess that was Bakunin, but an Emerson field sucked enough power that you didn’t turn one on unless you imminently expected to be targeted by some energy weapon, otherwise you’d suck the massive power sink dry long before the field would be of any use.
Nickolai did his best not to shift his body language. Raising his pitcher to his lips he said, “Three men behind you.” He kept his attention on the three men in his peripheral vision. Either they were very good at covering their reaction, or they didn’t have audio surveillance on them.
“What?” Kugara said.
“Body armor, active Emerson fields, LOS on our table.”
“Armed?”
“Who isn’t?” Nickolai lowered the pitcher and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he whispered, “Handguns at most, holstered.” He scanned the bar crowd and didn’t see anyone else with the telltale of an active field.
Kugara pushed her glass toward the center of the table with both hands, and leaned forward with a smile, as if she was sharing some drunken confidence. “Corner booth, third from the front door?” she whispered.
Nickolai nodded and glanced up at the faraway ceiling. The unusual layout of the mall here made their position unusually exposed. One spotter in the scaffolding above could have a lock on their position almost anywhere they went. The current false-color IR view with which he saw the world showed him two glowing patches up against the ceiling.
He could focus tightly on them, two men in dark clothing. The two of them had taken partial cover near the HVAC duct that pumped cool air into the cavernous space below, and every time they exhaled they released a cloud of warm moist vapor into the cold dry air by the duct.
One spotter, one sniper . . .
“Brace yourself,” Nickolai said.
He dropped the pitcher and grappled the edge of the table, throwing the edge upward between him and the watchers in the ceiling. He relied on the fact that his reaction time was quicker than that of the Fallen surrounding him. As he dove for Kugara, the large mass of the moving table had already begun a chain reaction of crashing glass, splintering wood, and human shouts. The air was suddenly filled with the sharp scent of spilled alcohol. He pushed her into a booth against the same wall as the trio of men in the corner booth. They fell on the table between two couples, Kugara landing underneath him with a grunt, spilling the occupants’ beverages.
The man to Nickolai’s left stood up and yelled, “What the fuck—”
It was the last thing the man ever said. The beam from the sniper’s weapon was invisible in normal spectra, but Nickolai was still seeing the world with enhanced IR. He could see the heat of the weapon’s trail hanging in the air, tearing through the spot where his head had been a quarter second before, and where this man’s chest was now.
Nickolai felt the pulse of combat stretching his sense of time as he rolled on his side, off of Kugara. Adrenaline surged through his muscles, like an electric current, every hair awake, alive, and strung tight as the world slowed
