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like mine, to cope with a shock stick, and he hit the ground a juddering mess.
    Rannu stepped past the one closing on him. As he did so, he grabbed the barrel of the gauss carbine and pushed it up over the gunman’s head. The gunman got tangled up in the weapon’s strap and found himself lying on the ground with Rannu kneeling next to him.
    Mudge cheated, in my opinion. The guy on him was distracted by the fun that Rannu and I were having. Mudge just sidestepped, drew his sidearm and levelled it at the guy’s head.
    I extended the claws on my right arm. Four nine-inch long, hardened ceramic blades slid out of my forearm through slits just behind my knuckles. I reached down to the recently electrocuted gunman, cut the sling off his gauss carbine and tossed it away. Then I walked over to the one that Mudge had covered.
    ‘Are you more reasonable?’
    ‘I ain’t telling you shit,’ he said in a manner I think he thought was macho. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. Mudge clattered him on the side of the head with his pistol. I looked reproachfully at Mudge. Not because he’d hit him but because you shouldn’t get so close to your target that they can reach you – as Rannu and I had just demonstrated.
    ‘What do you want?!’ I screamed. The guy just kept his mouth shut. ‘Do you realise how fucking stupid it is to go to all this effort and not tell us?!’
    ‘Someone wants to see you,’ the guy that Rannu had taken down shouted.
    ‘Shut up!’ Mudge’s guy yelled.
    ‘You’re supposed to tell us that,’ I tried pointing out. I then walked over to Rannu and his prone friend.
    ‘Who?’ I asked him.
    ‘Sharcroft,’ he said. The name meant nothing to me. I told him that. Mudge joined us, forcing his prisoner to his knees in front of him. Mudge was sub-vocalising something as he did this.
    ‘What does he want?’ I asked.
    ‘He has a proposal,’ the guy said.
    ‘Funny way of making it. If you’d succeeded then we’d be useless to him. You didn’t, so he should have sent smarter people. Either way I’m not inclined to meet him.’
    ‘Look, we fucked up.’ He looked over at the guy whose face I’d electrocuted.
    ‘Trying to prove yourself?’ I asked. The guy said nothing. He just glared resentfully at his unconscious mate.
    ‘Trying to prove himself, was he?’ I asked. The look on the guy’s face said it all. The arrogant part of me was scornful of them thinking they stood a chance.
    ‘You need some proper trigger time, sunshine. You are way out of your league,’ Mudge said. I turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. Sometimes I thought that the SAS had been a bad influence on Mudge. Though it could have been the other way around. Mudge shrugged.
    ‘Simon Sharcroft?’ he asked the talkative one. The guy nodded.
    ‘Know him?’ I asked.
    ‘Know of him. So do you,’ Mudge said. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘He’s one of the Cabal.’ I lost my sense of humour and drew my Mastodon from its holster.
    ‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ Rannu’s prisoner shouted as he got a good look at the massive .454 revolver designed for killing Berserks.
    ‘You fucking pussy!’ Mudge’s prisoner spat at the guy. ‘Ow!’ Mudge had clouted him round the head with his pistol. I think Mudge was starting to enjoy this sort of thing too much.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. Was it starting all over again? Surely the Cabal couldn’t be starting up again – could it?
    ‘All I know is that he wants a meet, I swear!’ Rannu’s prisoner was begging. A text file appeared in the corner of my IVD sent by Mudge. I opened it and scanned the words superimposed over my vision.
    Sharcroft was from some old – meaning pre-FHC – money family, America’s answer to Britain’s aristocracy. Right schools, right fraternities, probably got his arse whipped with rolled-up towels in the right secret societies. Sharcroft was a Pentagon II insider. He was an intelligence and government powerbroker and acted as a