Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean—Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.

Best to play it safe.

The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.

Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-grenade. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere

I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar.

Her face looked bruised.

I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.

“Can you stand?”

A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.

“Out. Try not to breathe.”

Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando.

Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.

“A light,” he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.”

He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.

“The angel.”

I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”

“The an—” And then something must have got through the hallucinogens.

His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.