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her nails. ‘He’ll just make making you miserable his hobby.’
    ‘He’s not doing that already?’ I asked.
    ‘Give me the money, Jakob,’ she said shyly. I sighed.
    ‘This is fucking petty even by his standards. You turn up to rob me?’ I asked. She shook her head.
    ‘Give me the money and go and kill them.’ She sounded quiet and meek. I dropped the bag of notes at her feet and tried to walk past her. She held a hand out. It just touched my chest but I stopped.
    ‘I’ll cover for you just once,’ she said and looked me in the eyes. My mouth went very dry and I swallowed involuntarily. She dropped her hand, letting me past. As I went down the steps the muzzle flashes from inside the apartment illuminated the car park briefly.

    I rode through the superstructure of the Rigs. Moving just a little faster than was safe for the rickety wooden boards and metal sheets that passed for roads. I wanted to stop, return to the cube, start drinking and maybe listen to some music. Try not to think about the two poor fuckers I’d just got killed for doing what we all have to do to survive. I knew, however, that if I did that Rolleston would keep on hounding me.
    Now I’d seen the Grey Lady I had a sense of urgency. I wanted this wrapped up and forgotten. I also needed the promised week in the sense booths, being fed by a drip, getting bedsores, my muscles atrophying and most importantly achieving a total loss of self, to forget about all this.
    Although I’d never been a special forces operator who enjoyed his work particularly, I also had to admit that the feeling that came from my enhancements, the feeling of moving like lightning when everyone else was mired down, was something I never grew tired of. So I was going to kill some stupid people and take out one more of Them. Big deal, another tiny step in a conflict that seemed to consume everything.
    They were the only other life that we’d ever encountered in space and we were at war with Them. This had to be a tiny drop in the ocean to the universe. Yet sometimes, when space was filled with bright beams burning across the night. When I was waiting in an assault shuttle for a drop, my life in someone else’s hands. When I was watching other shuttles tumbling towards planets to burn on entry. Sometimes it looked and felt like the entire universe was at war.

4
    Dundee
    The Forbidden Pleasure was neither all that forbidden nor pleasurable. It had once been a container ship. Most of the containers had been scavenged long ago to create what I liked to think of as the upper-class neighbourhood on the Rigs. The remaining containers of the horribly corroded three-hundred-year-old craft had been sectioned off with cardboard walls and turned into a production-line-style knocking shop. This was the place where the inhabitants of the Rigs came to experience the meat.
    The bridge had been stripped out long ago, non-supporting bulkheads cut through and the whole deck converted into some impoverished idea of what a lounge bar was supposed to be. It was a sick joke. A taunt to the people forced to live on the Rigs. I climbed up the metal stairs to the bridge deck. I dampened my enhanced hearing to drown out the grunts, sighs, the faked orgasms and the screams of pain. I was trying not to think about how working here or in one of the other flesh parlours in the Rigs was one of the few chances to make a living the young on the Rigs had. Though they were used up quickly.
    I tried to slip into the bar on the bridge deck as inconspicuously as possible, but my long coat and the way you move with reflexes as wired as mine gave me away. I eased into one of the high chairs at the bar, aware of eyes burning into my back. The bridge bar was for the high-rollers, by the standards of the Rigs. The rest just took their turn at the turnstiles in the lottery-like system on the foredeck. The security was violent young men and women with cheap ware and assault rifles.
    The boys and girls in the bar