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thought. I lose sight of him for a moment behind an abnormally high pile of crates, and my stomach twists with sudden fear. Maybe he knows where I am, and he’s moving in for a clean shot . . . But then the big brutal muzzle pokes out into the open again, followed by Bart himself, and I breathe a little easier.
    Part of me wants to cap him right now. The wire tells me I can put a burst right on the money, all five rounds impacting within a centimeter of his ugly ear before he even knows what’s happening. But then my years of drek-sucking cop training get in the way: lethal force only in response to direct threats and all that jazz. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong about Bart wanting to grease me, and taking him down before I’m sure is just plain premeditated murder (yes, officer, I'll come quietly). Below, the bloated ork pivots slowly and his shotgun comes to bear on something. My eyes follow his intended line of fire.
    It’s Paco. Continuing his sweep, the young ganger has just cleared a crate that’s marked as machine parts. I see his head move slightly and I know he picked up Bart in his peripheral vision. I also know he’s labeled the ork as “friendly,” and decided to ignore him. Bart moves the shotgun to follow, and I know what’s going to happen. The ork’s “mandate” isn’t to drop only me, but anyone who’s personally loyal to me as well.
    “Paco, break!” I scream, and not a millisecond too soon. The younger ganger reacts like he’s chipped to the max, flings himself forward and down into the cover of some macroplast shipping cases.
    The assault shotgun roars, the burst disintegrating the crate where Paco was standing an instant before. The ganger might have caught the periphery of the shot pattern, and almost certainly got hit by what was left of the crate, but odds are he lived through it. Not through any fault of Bart’s, of course.
    I bring my H & K to bear, putting the sighting dot on the ork’s temple. “You’re out of here,” I say.
    But before I can pull the trigger, he’s coming around, bringing the AS7 up into line. Faster than I’ve ever seen him move, faster than anyone has a right to move. He pulls the trigger and the big motherfragging gun roars again.
    Too soon, an instant too soon. The light next to me, the metal housing, and a good chunk of the wall explode into shrapnel. Splinters of metal lash my bare hands and face. Instinctively I bring up my right hand—my gun hand—to shield my eyes, an instant too late to do any good. Then I have to bring my H & K back into line.
    I’ve got enough time to make it good this time around. Bart had to swing the shotgun’s shock pad off his hip when he spun to take a shot at me, so he didn’t have the pad to absorb any of the recoil when he fired. Strong as he is, he’s not strong enough to stop an AS7 on burst-fire riding way the frag up and off-line. And strong as he is, it’s not enough to wrestle the gun back onto target before a five-round burst of nine-mil smashes his skull wide open.
    “Scrag ’em all,” I mutter as I clamber down the ladder, trying to control the sudden shaking in my hands and the wrenching in my gut.

7
    And to think I’d been concerned about how to deal with Ranger. Elementary, my dear Watson, and all that drek. I didn’t even have to lift a finger.
    With Big Bad Bart’s brains blasted, I let the rest of Teams A and B geek the other Eighty-Eights and have fun with their grenades while Paco and I slipped outside for a quick discussion. It took all the jam I had to suppress my reaction—the shakes, the nausea, the sense of absolute fragging wrongness —that comes every time I’ve had to kill someone. (Every time? Well, to be honest, priyatel, that’s both times—including Bart.) Anyway, I was sure that showing such a reaction would probably diminish me in Paco’s eyes, something decidedly counterproductive at the moment. So I bit back on everything, shoving it into the old emotional gunnysack