Suddenly the fluid was draining away from all around him. As it went, he found himself lying at the bottom of a slimy hollow in a tangle of tubes. He stared up at the two faces hovering above him and he could feel the machinery attached to his body. This wasn’t right. Who were these people?

ERROR MESSAGE: PHYSICAL RESISTANCE TO CYBPLANT.

DISCONNECT.

Keech tried to ask them who they were, and what was going on. A colder part of himself already knew, and it tried to tell him as fluid jetted from his lungs and from his mouth. He felt he was drowning, and started to struggle.

You are the reification Sable Keech. You have been dead for seven hundred years.

Keech gave a liquid gasp, and the sound he next made was more of a croak than a scream. The cold part of himself acknowledged that there was only one thing to do.

MEMPLANT MESSAGE: FULL DOWNLOAD TO ORGANIC BRAIN.

The memories began to return. As they returned, Keech could no longer fight: he was paralysed. A door opened before him and he walked into the apartment, drawing his EC-issue thin-gun. The stink he recognized from Spatterjay: the almost savoury smell of charred flesh. He only recognized his contact because the man was still wearing the bright green shirt he was wearing when he’d left the com message. The face itself wasn’t recognizable, as there was no face. Whoever had done this had obviously taken pleasure in it: they’d tied the man to the chair and done it slowly. This much was evident by the way the man had torn off his own nails by clawing at the chair arms.

Keech moved on into the room, then checked all the doors leading off from it. Nothing he could do here now; he’d come back with the forensic team and go through this room at microscopic level. But he didn’t need the evidence they’d find to know who had been here earlier. He stepped out of the apartment and closed the door behind him, as well as he could, the lock being broken. Holstering his thin-gun he moved to the elevator, stepped inside, and descended the twenty floors to street level. Outside the building, one of those heavy rains that seemed to fall only in Klader was shining the hydrocar streets and running streams past the pavements. Keech folded up his collar and headed for his battered police hydrocar. Would this be another dead end, in more ways than one?

His answer stepped out of the alley next to his car.

‘Sable Keech,’ the man sneered.

He was short, thin-faced, and bald-headed, the heavy coat he wore not concealing the fact that he possessed a physique that appeared boosted. But it wasn’t boosted, not in the usual sense. Keech didn’t bother to respond with words. He pulled his gun and fired, and Alphed Rimsc went over backwards, with a smoking hole through his middle. Keech walked over, his thin-gun down at his side. Just like that: got him.