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error: the equivalent of assassinating Franz
Ferdinand because you
really
hate a bunch of limpid individuals banging on
about the corner of some forgotten field, and want to see the lot of them end
up dead.
    Such seriously shit-hot Control and Command equipment didn’t come cheap, of
course, but NeoGen supplied its Retrieval people with the best—especially
if said people were going up against such an equally-matched rival as GenTech.
    Such tactical control-processes had worked perfectly in the matter of setting
some local jackgang on a GenTech road-train, manipulating the various factors
in such a matter that the forces neutralized each other. Then Drexler and his
squad had moved in to pick up the pieces… and hit that gap in expectations.
    There was another factor on the board. And that factor, simply, was just some
guy that nobody gave a flying fuck about.
    There was not a single person who particularly knew or cared if he lived and
died—and that was the problem right there. It was like some idiotic squit
of a kid going up against a Grand Master in chess; the kid does things so
flatly idiotic that it leaves the Grand Master momentarily flummoxed.
    The kid and the package, together with the package’s medical support, had fled
the site of the road-train ambush just before Drexler and his NeoGen forces
had arrived. Tracksat systems had pinpointed the little RV almost instantly,
but the forces on the ground found themselves with a problem. NeoGen had come
armed and ready to deal with GenTech or jackganger survivors; they were
perfectly capable of leaving some escaping piece-of-crap van a smoking hole in
the road that not even micro-engineered algaeic heal-sealant would be able to fill.
    What they did not have, however, was the capacity to intercept and stop it
without damaging the package irreparably.
    Tracksat extrapolation had showed that the van was heading for Las Vitas, and
military-spec four-wheel drive had made it in half the time, even over rough
terrain. Drexler had looked around the shithole and not reckoned much to it.
Too many holes and corners. Street-fighting could get messy.
    So Drexler and his boys had broken out their heavy-duty armament and removed
the town from the equation.
    He didn’t feel particularly good about that, but then again he didn’t feel bad
either. It was just what you had to do, sometimes.
    The only other place, within practical distance and with communications, had
been the junker’s yard here. Strategic modelling of all available factors
placed the probability of containing the target here in the upper ninetieth
percentile.
    That, at least, was what MIRA had assured Commander Drexler. Drexler, on the
other hand, was rapidly coming to the conclusion that MIRA was at this point
just making it up off the top of her cybernetic head and winging it.
    “What was that shit about calling the guy a spic?” he asked MIRA. “Plus all
that, you know, religious stuff?”
    Ordinarily, the Mobile Intrusion and Recon Application was capable of pumping
all kinds of psychological disruption to a target: insults based on their
specific gangcult, dark intimations of what the subject really felt about some
family member and the so forth. This had just seemed unnecessarily basic and
crude.
    “Yeah, well, I just don’t have the hard info,” MIRA said cheerfully. For all
that the voice issuing from the exterior bullhorn-attachment had been
deepened, roughened and masculinized, MIRA “herself” tended to adopt a female
persona. That is, a lighter, higher and feminine voice, while still in some
subliminal way failing to be human in any way whatsoever.
    “Filesearch on the girl throws up nothing, just like all these total blanks,
yeah?” MIRA said. “Like someone went through the files and wiped her
footprints out. And the guy never left no footprints in the first place—he’s
just some kid, you know? I’m just playing the law of averages and throwing out
some generic insults. I’m having to