His shirt billowed out behind him. By the time she reached the intersection he had vanished: thereafter she only ever saw him at a remove, dwarfed by the maze, his attempts  to run  producing comical slow-motion. Eventually, a muted wailing noise rose, as of a painful incident at the most distant edge of the landing field; in the same moment, she rounded a corner to find him hanging eight feet above the ground, revolving in a slow, loose double loop. His white cap was missing. He was smiling. He was dead. Whatever he had been pushing was gone.

Lost and found, the assistant thought.

A voice in her ear whispered, ‘Hi, my name is Pearlent and—’

Her chops came back up in a rush. The context blurred. The assistant  smelled target  chemistry,  tailored  kairomones  characteristically sweet and  rank.  A monster  like herself, something fixed up by cutters with an adolescent view of the future, it darted away in  front  of her  in  random  evasion  patterns:  stinking  of HPA hyperactivity; emitting frequencies she could detect but not produce – 27 to 40 gHz, some kind of local surveillance medium; and uploading in an unfocused FTL scream to destinations  she couldn’t guess. They duelled between the buildings, thirty or forty seconds without coming to terms. When the assistant paused to listen, the creature froze and shut down its systems; otherwise it stayed in the shadows, kept up the momentum,  entered one structure even as it seemed to exit from another, smashing down a door whilst bursting out of a sidewall twenty yards away in a suspended explosion of clapboard fragments. It was faster than  her. It was angrier. It had made no attempt to identify or engage her. Instead it seemed to be engaged in an argument with itself. Eventually she gave up. Listened to its footfalls thud and rage away into the distance, where the tilted wrecks of space ships– victims as much of commodity prices as of the high-energy astrophysics out in Radio Bay – sank into badland sediments laced with unexposed ore. The creature spurted off between them, churning up plumes of rotten earth until it vanished, two or three kilometres off, into a line of low hills. Not running away, she thought, so much as struggling to contain its own responses. She went back to the corpse.