even louder than the distant gunfire. My
foster father, of course, would never let
me stay up late enough to find out what
went on in these, but once, when he was
away tending his molecular still, I waited
for darkness and then crept through the
streets to see.
One bar was entirely Islamic Federation
Turks, wearing green turbans and uniforms
of dark maroon denim, with spindly
railgun-launchers slung across their backs
and knives and swords strung on leather
straps across their bodies. Each one had
in front of him a tiny cup of dark coffee
and a clear glass of whisky. I thought I
was invisible in the doorway, but one of
the Turks, a tall man with a pocked face
and a dark moustache that drooped down the
side of his mouth, looked up, and without
smiling, said, "Hoy, little girl, I think
that you are in the wrong place."
In the next club, mercenaries wearing
cowboy hats, with black uniforms and
fingerless leather gloves, had parked
their guns against the walls before
settling in to pound down whisky in a bar
where the music was so loud that the beat
reverberated across half the city. The one
closest to the door had a shaven head,
with a spiderweb tattooed up his neck, and
daggers and weird heraldic symbols
tattooed across his arms. When he looked
up at me, standing in the doorway, he
smiled, and I realized that he had been
watching me for some time, probably ever
since I had appeared. His smile was far
more frightening than the impassive face
of the Turk. I ran all the way home.
In the daytime, the snap of a sniperтs
rifle might prompt an exchange of heavy
machine-gun fire, a wild, rattling sound
that echoed crazily from the hills.
Small-arms fire would sound, tak, tak,
tak, answered by the singing of small
railguns, tee, tee. You canтt tell the
source of rifle fire in an urban
environment; it seems to come from all
