They didn't fire at the red-eyed man. They started slicing through the lineup behind him. Half a dozen people fell bisected, cauterized, their troubles suddenly over. Others stared disbelieving at neat, smoking holes in their limbs and torsos. On the far side of a sudden barbequed jigsaw, brown grass burst into flame. Water Music played on in the background without missing a beat.

After a moment that seemed to go on forever, people remembered to scream.

The Red-eyed man, all threat and bluster gone from his body, stood dumbfounded and pincushioned by a dozen neurotoxic darts. He gaped soundlessly at Taka, teetering. He raised his hands, palms up, supplicating: goddamn woman, I never meant…!

He toppled, rigid with tetanus.

People ran, or twitched, or lay still. The lasers dipped and weaved, scrawling blackened gibberish onto the ground. Fire guttered here and there among the curlicues, bright staccatos against the failing light.

Taka pulled frantically at the passenger door; fortunately the renegade system hadn't charged the hull. It had locked her out, though; this was the door that was supposed to stay unlocked, the route to refuge—

It's online how in God's name can it be online —

But she could see the telltale on her dashboard, flashing scarlet. The MI was somehow uplinked to the wide wireless world, to the networked monsters that lived and hunted in there, to—

A Madonna. A Lenie. It had to be.

Another telltale winked from a different part of the dashboard. Belatedly, Taka read the signs: the driver's door was unlocked. She threw herself around the front of the vehicle. She kept her eyes on the ground, some religious impulse averting them from the wrath of God, if I don't see it maybe it won't see me but she could hear the turret just above her, tracking and firing, tracking and—

She piled into the cab, yanked the door behind her, locked it.

The cab's eyephones lay on the floor beside the seat. A tiny aurora of light writhed across the deck from its oculars. She snatched up the phones and held them to her face.

The Madonna's twisted face raged within an inset on the main display. There was no sound—Taka left the headset muted by default.

Shitsucker. It got in through GPS. She always kept GPS offline when she wasn't traveling; somehow the invader must have spoofed the system.

She killed nav. The screaming thing in the window went out. Overhead, the lasers ceased fire with a downshifting whine.

Water Music had ended sometime during the massacre. Tchaikovsky had stepped into the gap. Iolanta.

It seemed like a very long while before she dared to move.

She killed the music. She hugged herself, shaking. She tried very hard not to cry like a frightened child. She told herself she'd done what she could.

She told herself it could have been worse.