People coming for him in earnest now. He makes sure he is transmitting his authority as a repatriator to all IFCs within ten feet. The feet do not slow down.

“Stand down,” he says. They do not.

He does fire warning shots into the stairs, but the dark, seething mass coming towards him seems even more inhuman. They’re human enough when lit up by muzzle flash. Few of them cry out, even though everybody hit falls. There’s a rage, a miasma of anger in the air, a sense of how-dare-you to all of them. Everybody is brave until they’re hit by a rubber bullet. Fin steps over the incapacitated to make progress up the stairs.

At a landing, he comes to a short corridor with rooms off it. Training says to clear the rooms before advancing, don’t leave an enemy at your back, but he knows the Lamber is not there. It’s higher up. Fin goes higher.

Resistance thins out, sporadic confused addicts who don’t even know what law enforcement means in an elastic universe. He can and does discourage them in a non-lethal way, but this has never been Fin’s favourite thing. He hates hand-to-hand because he does not like to touch people, but the very hatred is what made him master the techniques, so that if he must do this it will take the shortest possible time.

All the hairs on Fin’s body stand on end and he knows the Lamber is mere feet away. He runs out of stairs and there is one person blocking an entrance. This person is resolute, and Fin does not suppose she is a user. This is some kind of believer in… what, freedom? The co-existence of alien species?

“You’re in the wrong place,” she says. “Go away and catch some crims, though.”

“Your IFC will have told you already. I am catching crims. You’re obstructing me.”

She charges for him, and at that moment he realises that she’s an Artificial. There’s an art to killing them. How much of that art can be carried out in low light is debatable. He does not, however, want to get into a clinch with her. He misses Salvo. He shoots her thigh, but it isn’t there. She avoids all subsequent shots. They are going to make contact. Damn it.