The child of a dynasty, Clark Newhampshire was certainly a promising mixture of inherited attributes. He had come out of hospital with the finest face of his litter, all his legal-siblings and contributors felt good when they saw it, it had the firm hallmarks of the family and yet avoided many of the flaws of their savage genes. His spectrum of personalities were pleasing to every echelon of power, within the family, all respecting his whoring and fighting and his deadly tactics in the bargaining arena. From his litter- that diverse selection of offspring that the Newhampshires decided to create every eight years- he had been promoted earliest to the ranks of influence. In a very few years, in fact in a propitious eight years after being first let out alone, he was appointed Probationary Head of The Crime And Justice Department responsible for overseeing the hard edge actions of the fourth largest corporation in his family’s empire within Eight hundred blocks of The Bond-Malenki Conurbation.
Crime and Justice, or CJ, was the armed contingent of Black-Black and Newhampshire Holdings, they acted as the internal police of the corporation, with powers of disappearance and personal injury over employees of BBNH, but were expected to turn a profit as a department by orchestrating criminal activity in the world outside the corp. His men were involved in three hundred times as many external ‘jobs’ as internal and as Clark’s reputation as a true Newhampshire, loud, aggressive and fond of a combination of women, alcohol and violence, grew and spread around the subsidiary all petty crime disappeared and the remainder of the problems could be eliminated with hard action, the method he much preferred.
Clark took a great satisfaction in ordering death but had only got to kill somebody a few times, maybe three. He had his mental death count modified upwards because he was sure that he must have hit someone in The Desolation Of The Chinks, as he thought of the large action that he had gone along on. The job was the elimination of a Chinese Fish Oil and Heroin Derivatives company which he had ordered at no gain to the corporation. It was a purely personal job, executed in the finest traditions of Petty Malice and Arrogant Intolerance.
He drove, was driven, past the ‘Splash and Dragon Co-op’ each morning on the route from his family lodgings to his team’s office, eight blocks away. And many evenings the bar that he headed to would take him past the shapeless, twice rebuilt warehouse that housed but failed to contain the smell of thick brine and milky opiates. He saw the young Chinese workers, flocking out of windows to repair the perilous and invisible roof, drifting out of the main door in groups and dispersing on their separate errands, as a denser and more noxious vapor given forth in near human form from the same source, The Poor. The Poor with their inability to better themselves or control their population in a disciplined fashion like the Newhampshires and their clamoring needs for Fish Oil and Painkillers. And none of them seemed to wear shoes, at least not real shoes, expensive shoes like his.
And so, one morning, he ordered the execution of:

1 anyone found in that building
 and
2 anyone suspected of working for that company
 and
3 anyone at the scene who looked poor.

He went along with the snipers’ group so that he would have a grandstand view and have the honour of shooting the opening salvo. They checked into a hotel six times taller than the Chinese operation and in ten minutes he was standing at a broad panoramic window in a line of four men, there were another three in the next room and they were all trained in the use of, and armed with, very powerful and evil weapons. Once in position the snipers froze like musical statues only a ripple of fingers gave away their life as they adjusted scopes and tracked minutely across the broad target.
In his habitual way he took a synthetic spider-silk handkerchief from his elegantly tailored suit, cut so that the massive steel and ceramic body armor ,that he had been told by his contributors always to wear, was concealed from the eyes of all but those who knew, and folded it before leaning forward to the window and resting his handkerchief protected forehead on the glass.
He disliked the dirty smudge that is left on windows after a long period of spying.
In his head expertly woven nerves pulsed and commanded and tiny mechanisms made of advanced materials shifted in his eyes. Smoothly the view of the hated factory zoomed in until he found his limit in the hairs on the arm of a seventeen year old who would be dead within five minutes. Clark zoomed out a little and watched the people he was going to kill, watched them live for a little while. Of  course they were never going to have lived as long as him, with his genetic profile and his internal backup and monitoring systems and when it came down to it his bloody good doctor, bloody expensive doctor that they were never going to have. One of his eyes continued to search the faces of the victims for a sign as to which should die first while the other eye smoothly pulled back to look at the whole scene.
His team could have done this job alone, without him, with only two operative, at night, quietly, but he had wanted them all here and they were all here, in broad daylight and had been briefed for maximum kills. The group that was actually going to enter the building had set up a tent stall selling kebabs and sausages directly opposite the heavy double doors of the factory, around which were sitting ten or more relaxing workers, some of whom bought sausages from their murderers.
All of a sudden Clark was tired of watching and disgusted with the object of his scrutiny and, as he always did with prostitutes, he lashed out. Pulling his eyes back into alignment and a mid-range view he transmitted “Fire” on the strike team’s closed mental loop, and gleefully watched the fireworks begin.
The young men and women in the suddenly stricken factory below were unarmed and unprepared for several thousand rounds of Maximum Penetration Crystal Anti-armor. Inside the factory and inside Clark’s head unknown internal fitments and employees were perforated and exploded in powdery plumes of subdued colour. Planned milliseconds after all six snipers ceased their rain of terror the sausage tent deployed its strike team. Four men shredded the lounging teenagers on the steps with short, fat, ugly guns allowing two to dash up the bloodsoaked stairs, heave a package inside, pull the doors shut and retreat to safety.
With a roaring whoosh and a long drawn out rumble the liquid-firebomb made the deaths of everyone inside the building an inescapable certainty. The doors took the force of the expanding bubble of flaming gas and flung it the length of the ground floor.
The contact team made its quick getaway but Clark and the snipers stayed to pick of any brave soul who managed to climb from a window or escape the rising, choking heat onto the roof. Clark emptied and refilled his automatic rifle many times, envying the snipers their plentiful, compact ammunition. He shot many more bullets than was necessary, his appetite whetted by what he had watched, as was his way.

At the age of twelve Tony was as big as he was going to get. He was a huge twelve year old but that was his limit. There were no Late-Teenage growth spurts that his Mother had assured him of, “Very common in our family, you will be a child until you are a man but then a real man will you be.”
His Mother had instilled in him a kind and courteous manner that endeared him to people because there was no suggestion of snobbery in it. Because he helped his Mother in the shop, and because people knew that, in their neighborhood he was known as “Oh, such a nice boy.”. Tony Orange and his Mother were Dark Mixture Europeans with large eyes, thick hair and lustrous skin and they slept and worked in a shop in an area without modern buildings. Their shop and the homes that it supported were built of brick and there were stone dwellings in their street. Though raised to be kind and helpful he received no education and really didn’t learn any skills beyond the reading and numeracy required to work in the shop so his Mother made a hard decision and sent him to the army.
The nice young boy at the age of sixteen salved his confusion and terror at the experience of boot camp with the thought that his Mother wanted him to do this because it would be best for him. He did not develop the usual Soldier’s face and manner but continued to be pleasant even to those who screamed abuse and threats at him. After a few clashes with non commissioned officers Military Intelligence took an interest and quickly worked out that he could be used in other than front line operations. He took to their training schemes perfectly, they only demanded, they did not punish, just like his Mother. Physically by the age of nineteen he was controlled and strong with the clumsiness, that his Mother had lamented in the shop, gone.
He learned the use of small concealable weapons which fired slivers of dried poison, blowpipes and small crossbows, needle guns and break-off knives made of irradiated heavy metals. He learned to be quiet and he learned to follow people in crowds. His training began to involve elements of real missions, he learned how to break necks, he was twenty two when he learned to kill people in the street, in a crush of bodies, seemingly nothing to do with him as the victim knelt slowly, resisted by the herd around him, and slowly curled into vomiting, bleeding death.
He didn’t like to kill but he was learning so much and seeing so much as his Mother had said. He was learning to drive trucks, which had never come into his old neighborhood, and learning to do something called swimming in a huge pool of water in a high security base. The people at Mil Int allowed him to write to his mother freely and she could write to him but he could contact no one else and Tony began to develop a monolithic patience in his dealings with other human beings. He expected nothing of anyone and relied entirely and exclusively upon himself. Letters from Mother were infrequent but they were long when they arrived and he didn’t mind that the people at Mil Int said that because of the important and sensitive nature of his work his period of service would have to be fifteen years. He was content doing what his Mother wanted and she seemed to be pleased at the prospect of a son with a pretty reliable pension.
When he was thirty the world changed and technology that he had worked with started to mutate and frighten him. The tiny number of other operatives with which he had any contact began to modify their bodies and minds, secretaries had computers inside, his support sniper had rangefinders in his eyes, his boss had his personnel file in his head. The weapons that he used became filthier and rent armored targets into thick chunks that appalled him or twitching, brain-burned ghosts that chilled him. His targets confused him, he got less an less background on the whys and wherefores of enemy groups or individuals, the Mil Int people seemed intent on striking as many domestic targets as possible at the same time he got the sense that the money was running out.
 He went to his commanding officer and asked to be pensioned off, compared to his usual interactions with his superiors it seemed an act of insubordination, and not just to him.
Tony was asked to complete a special task before his senior would organize the paperwork.
The job was suitable for a retiring agent, it was explained by the people at Mil Int, because it was a very public job and a very suitable job for an agent of his standing because, they explained, it was also a field test of a new weapon. He was given a staff with a ball of glass attached to one end with bands of metal. This staff was for practicing, explained the people at Mil Int, the real weapon would have a liquid in a slightly different shaped head but , they explained, the design was still being tested and readied.
The staff was part of his cover as a member of a troupe of caperers and jugglers and jesters at the head of a carnival procession. The target was the Mayor of the town in which the Carnival Of Joy was being held, a man who understandably resisted the purchase of the land surrounding his town by property developers from the nearby, and expanding, Malenki conurbation. The Mayor had never been photographed out of his car, ever, even on milliwave camera inside his home. It was deduced that The Mayor was the car and that a hit upon the organic component would only result in a bad public relations mess and a rebuilt enemy that had lived on in the body of the vehicle. Tony would use the prototype weapon, an expanding corrosive, they explained, in a cap that would direct most of the damage away from him, and then be captured by the town police, he would confess and then escape before trial, with or without help, the people from Mil Int didn’t explain.
The line that he would feed, and that his documentary cover should back up, was that he was a lone ideologist, fighting for The Global Village or The One City State.
He practiced with the staff like a band leader, twirling it to fascinate people and throwing it up to draw their  eyes. He practiced with the staff like a pikeman, gaining in accuracy with his long thrusts, using the whole body and leverage of the weapon to deliver powerful blows and being very careful of the business end. It wouldn’t do to smash the vial before the hit. He was practicing for the moment when The Mayor would address the townfolk. He was just behind the harlequins and dancers and at the thickest point of the crowd he would slowly accelerate through their ranks, as they fanned out for him, and speak to the masses, at a stately crawl, through a loudspeaker on his car. It would be a little different to that on the day.
All too soon further preparation was pointless, the day had arrived and there only remained to do the awful deed.
He cleared his mind and got on with the serious business of playing the fool, jigging with dignity and giggling with purpose. The Mayor purred behind him, the sound of a fat cat being stroked. It was a sunny day and The Carnival Of Joy was living up to its name as the throng cooed and ooohed at the procession. Children laughed and Mothers smiled. Tony felt sick. He didn’t get nerves without reason and he wondered where the hole in the plan was. Would he ever get out of a cell in this town alive? Who knew what they would do to him after this and at a time like this? He could not actually think of the acts themselves because they were too close. Would the weapon work?
A rise in pitch of the sound of the crowd and The Mayor warned him that now he must do and not think. A glance around as he skipped confirmed that the troupe was fanning out and thinning but that he, in the middle, was not required to move yet. He watched the orange liquid in the bulb at the end of his staff, it seemed to gorge on the sunlight and throw the light out again in a fiery glow, the staff spun and the bulb flew.
Tony Orange glanced back again to check that he was alone in front of The Mayor and when he saw that he was he began to accelerate. He jigged faster and outpaced the advancing car, he spun his staff in crazy spirals, he stamped and shook his staff like a spear, defiantly, at the crowd; under his face-paint he glowered and grimaced and looked hatred at the laughing children and the smiling Mothers. He felt sick and his hands were slippy with sweat that wasn’t from exertion.
He started to spin and held the staff above his head, the orange glow rising into the bright sky. He looked at: The Mayor who didn’t really deserve to die.
The crowd that didn’t deserve to lose their town.
The Mayor who’s huge, fat, smiling face beamed at him.
The crowd that ooohed and aaahed at him spinning.
The Mayor who was going to die smiling.
The crowd that didn’t know what was going to hit it, not now, not when the developers arrived in a month.
The Mayor who had started to say “Thank you! Thank you!”
Tony Orange took one step back down the route he had taken and smartly brought the glass bulb down dead centre on the car’s bonnet a foot from the windscreen.
Tony had been wary of a contact delivery corrosive weapon and was shying away from the point of contact in case he got sprayed but he could never have expected the effect that the smashing of the vial would have. There was a spray effect of a kind, an orange fist of directed expanding matter extended from the staff-tip and passed through the dashboard and windscreen and the human component of The Mayor in an instant, melting them. Then the force of the superheated jet overwhelmed the delivery system and the head exploded, slowly as explosions go. A ball of orange expanded from the point of contact and eliminated everything in its area of effect with a sound like grilling bacon that was clearly, horrifyingly audible over the awestuck silence of the crowd.
He had jumped backwards and had shielded his face with his hands as the staff dissolved in his grip, the rapidly cooling orange ball had only brushed him but his hands burned with an incredible pain and his eyes burned with an incredible white light.
He awoke moments later to a world of screams, not just his own, and looked around vacantly at the screaming children and the crying Mothers. He got to his feet. Before him were the remains of The Mayor, a cauldron excavated in the tarmac filled to the brim with spitting, bubbling, shrieking, contracting metal surrounded by vague lumps, that had been his extremities, fused to the road.
When he got out of the hospital his Mother was dead and the old neighborhood was a stinking wreck of human detritus. He had tried to return to the Headquarters that he knew once the pain in his hands had gone down. There was no trace of the offices or the people that he had known, they had flit. His name brought no recognition from the military authorities, not only not as an assassin, at which he was unsurprised, but not as a recruit either or as a citizen or as having been born or voted or paid tax or been in hospital, which was a shock. He returned home and found that every month his pay was sent to a dead woman in a block of flats that had been burned out so thoroughly that he speculated as to whether the army had a hand in it.
He didn’t lose it for about six months. He got a job without his lack of official identity or his horribly scarred hands causing a problem and began to be a normal person, shuffling through life under the weight of organized injustice and personal pain.
Then his hands started to play up. Growths, lumps, pustules, pain that was literally blinding. The flesh became thick and hard and unresponsive. He could operate the fingers with no loss of accuracy but he felt nothing except alienation from them. He called them his ‘Killers Hands’. They went black like a beetle and horny but without the symmetry or grace of the insect world. The texture of his hands resemble nothing so much as no-man’s land, smashed, hummocked and lifeless.
It looked like the place that he had lived with his mother in the days that had passed. It was a shifting, treacherous desert of smashed-brick dunes traversed by nomadic people of the super-longterm homeless class, those who were born on the streets and would die on the streets never having owned anything in the conventional sense. He could find no one whom he had ever known amongst the milling families of depressant addicts or the wild eyed, wild haired scavengers but he began to spend more and more time there, where people were to far gone to care when he didn’t wear gloves and his blunt talons were on show.
Tony lost his job. People feared him and his contempt for life was too close to the surface to allow them to relax. He felt a growing lethargy that he feared, feared enough to succumb to.
A little before he became truly part of the scenery in the smashed-brick wasteland he spent his days, days empty of purpose, wandering, wandering lacking a direction. He would go to public places where he could be close to people without them asking him who he was. He didn’t want to talk to people, his status as a non-person, an unlisted identity, made it hard to tell the truth and easy to lie; but lies satisfy the hearer much more than the liar and Tony was not nourished by a veneer of acceptance but by honestly given love. He began to hang around the courts, listening to the arguments about right and wrong, concepts which had not entered his life before, and he began to get angry at the people at Mil Int who had stolen his hands and used them to kill then dropped him, handless, to die. The pain in his hands diminished with less chemical coercion when he imagined locking them, dead killer’s hands, around the neck of their creator, whoever that was, whoever had designed and deployed the Orange ball.
 He took to training again and made some money as a bare knuckle fighter in the orange lit streets. His hands gave him an advantage here because with every hurt that they inflicted the internal pain lessened. He never bruised, that was for other people now. Even the shock of a full force punch did not transmit through the deadened bone but there was a moment, a moment when he knew that he had scored a wicked strike on his soft opponent, that he identified completely with his twisted new hands, it seemed that his nerves enjoyed reporting the pain of others and were incapable of feeling their own.
He went to the courtrooms more and more often, learning small amounts of law and large numbers of lawyers, getting angrier and older, something must be done.
When he had found a candidate that fitted his requirements; about his own age, full of judgmental fury and devoted to integrity and justice; he made a quiet approach and spoke to the man about the way that the army had treated him.
The Lawyer’s even, wise face thought. It asked a few precise questions. It thought some more.
“I cannot help you in any legal action against your former employers.”
Tony sank in his chair, crushed, seeing himself dead, in a year, on the street, where his mother had died, who knew how long ago?
“I can offer you sporadic employment that may suit your training and provide you with opportunities for taking your own, illegal, revenge.”
Tony Orange straightened into the parade ground stance that he had never managed in The Army and received his first comprehensive briefing from a new employer. The leader of a rape-gang had been given a paltry sentence because of the quality of evidence that had been collected against him, the trial had covered most of the crimes that it would ever be possible to convict him for and, since he could not be tried twice, The Lawyer saw it as an opportunity missed.
Later that same night Tony broke into his room in the laughably secure Civic Police building and gave him a dose of muscle contractant, which curled him up on the floor of his cell and snapped him like a twig under his own strength

Certain things needed to be done and The Powers That Be had ordered that Mr. Michael Pathway would do them. Those knowledgeable Powers understood that the undertaking was not within the normal remit of Mr. Pathway’s duties but in these times of emergency level public intelligence expenditure all hands must be placed on the pump and applied with vigor, it must be understood. Also he was so very, very quiet. And Patient. And thorough, meticulous, conscientious, punctual, cheap to run and all of the other things that bosses love so he had been picked; they were sure that he would have no problem with the unusual nature of the operation.
Mike Pathway’s usual jobs were recoveries. Many things interested his employers and he was sent to retrieve them for closer scrutiny. He obtained documents from offices; he stole books from Satanists; he lifted disks from sleeping geek’s pockets; he crawled through pitch-black sewers with suitcases of prototype hands; In the lean times for his department he deprived jewellers of their finest trinkets. Now they wanted a head.
“Not for some sick pleasure,” The Fat Controller assured him, “The head contains some very new toys for Florinda and her Technical Girls. In fact we don’t need the whole head but you’d better bring it all because we think that the interesting bits are wired to explode and we don’t want that to happen do we? Good.”
Yes, brilliant. So Mike took a lift to the basement to see Florrie, if the mission was a favour to her then she should give him something to help him, whatever it was. The office tone of the rooms above was totally replaced in Florrie’s domain by a strong suggestion of hospitals. Mike, being an outside agent, had to swipe himself through two doors, enclosing a space that would have been death to him if the first door had doubted his intentions, and entered another far too brightly lit room. Florrie was conspicuously lurching between desks spread with objects and oddments, carrying a clipboard. Florinda Marshall, tall and aged, full of energy, still using a pencil. She ran the last and finest government technological research lab and she still had not a single modification within her own body or mind. Mike admired and loved her in spite of her resistance to both.
“What’s the deal on this skull, Florrie, then, what’s worth poking around inside it for, again, eh?” It would have seemed odd to say ‘hello’ to chit-chat about anything but boxes of tricks.
“It is very simple, Michael, the eyes in the head represent the first improvement upon, rather than manipulation of, standard human vision. They can see in the dark and focus miles off and anything beyond that is guessing until you bring them to me.”
Mike was about to speak when she spoke again.
“Here is something to take off the head, and I have some 14.5mm ammunition in a rucksack for you.”
She had covered everything that he could say and he silently took her gifts and left.
The first thing to do was to set up his steel companion in a conference centre with a superb view of the super-urban downtown of The Bond-Malenki conurbation. He got a meeting room at a reasonable rate for the day and took up his fat suitcase of ‘projection equipment’. He pushed most of the furniture to one wall of the room with his hip and laid the case in the middle of the floor. He returned to his waiting power-rickshaw and paid the driver, picked up a heavy box of ‘handout leaflets’ and reascended. The smallest table in the meeting room was commandeered and he set the heavy box down. From the suitcase he slowly built a large, motorised tripod and a long gun with advanced sighting sensors around the end of the barrel. The small table was dragged close and the box ripped open to reveal snakes and snakes of linked rounds. He loaded the cannon and performed alignment and sighting checks, he could terminate anyone in the street that stretched away from the foot of his building to the smog visibility horizon.
Mike had decided on the street because it meant for a quick removal and these days there were fewer witnesses, visible and invisible, outside than in. If there was a moment which took his fancy then he would quietly swipe the head and touch no one but he was prepared to kill every one of its defenders, even its owner, if that became necessary.
The target was a rich, feckless party animal, Mike remembered the words of The Fat Controller “He uses this technology for spying on women.” It would offend TFC that a man should buy telescopes for inside his head but never use them to look at the stars. TFC was a retro nut who wore clothes that had been fashionable even before he was born, he loved the stars and had once been into orbit to see them without the pollution haze. Mike had stationed himself outside the target’s home at midnight, allowing himself half an hour before the target would possibly get home, a good hour probably. Mike was blessed with legs that stood easily, his back did not get pained by a long stand, his knees made no noises if he crouched quickly, for a man with forty in his sights he had been indeed blessed physically. He looked up, to see if there were any stars, if there were he knew how to tell which way was north and how to keep a straight path, there were none visible in the close orange sky.
There was a guard apiece on each side of the door, heavily modified men who did not see him approach or hear him adjust his katana to squat in his favoured position. He was waiting for the very big, very long, very black car that the target would be arriving in.
In the hour that he waited the homeless began to meander around him, knowing that he was not one of them but acting as if he were because he was sitting in the right place. He only moved to maintain bloodflow to his feet.
The car that bore the prize appeared, moving sedately, in the cannon’s field of view, that view was relayed to Mike’s left eye and Mike saw the car. He also saw, with his own eyes, a pile of refuse a stone’s throw down the street shift and disgorge a man. The man was small and wiry and wore huge boots that made his legs seem all the smaller. His hands were likewise muffled in ridiculously thick gloves. The small man trotted towards the door guards without seeming to look directly at anything to indicate his object.
The heavy car was slowing down and drifting towards the uneven kerb when the guards saw it and one straightened while the other stepped forward to operate the door.
Mike rose, intending to open the passenger door of the car when the engine died and the guards were distracted by the small, funnily-dressed man. He could then reach in an decapitate the target with the car shielding him from their view.
As the car came to a halt opposite the doors the small man pushed a concealed button in his sleeve.
Both the guard stations at the doors exploded in a mass of fragments, the guard who had not moved forward to greet the vehicle was killed instantly. Blackout smoke, thick and suffused with irritant chemicals swamped the doors and the pavement.
The small man ran onto the road and pulled a short, rocket gun from his oversized sleeves. He took out the driver and the windscreen with three punching shots that sprayed orange sparks into the sky.
Mike ducked and covered as the small man emptied the six shot magazine of micro missiles, gutting the car.
The small man dropped the rocket launcher and pulled a handgun from his other sleeve. He leaped onto the bonnet and scanned the twisted innards for his victim, there was none save the driver. The small man glanced at Mike and, pulling on a gasmask, stepped into the smoke.
He had only seen his face for a moment, and he knew that the man did not recognise him, but a chipped file in Mike’s head told him that this was Tony Orange, a government assassin who had been zeroed eight years previously, while the target with the eyes was being grown in a vat. Tony had been retired by placing a plasma ball with him and ordering him to break the seal. It seemed that he was not dead but had somehow avoided the effects of plasma burning, for surviving Mike respected him.
Vaulting the car Mike dropped a grenade of his own at the entrance and ran into the building with a lungfull of air.
Blackout smoke deadens everything, light penetration, laser penetration, sound penetration and is lethal in respectable doses, Mike didn’t hear the gunfire until he was through into the clear air. Inside only a few windows were letting in light. As he entered the lobby he saw the target getting into an elevator and the doors pinging shut. The lift had brought reinforcements to the target’s aid. Four metal bound gunmen sprayed pellets of death diagonally across the room at Tony Orange who crouched behind terrible soft cover of desks, filing cabinets and pot plants. He looked like he was regretting entering the building as bullets burst through wood inches from his face.
Mike hurled two of his sleep grenades into the midst of the marksmen and spun on his toes to plunge back through the smoke to safety.
Out on the street he wiped his steaming eyes with the hem of his soft, dark robe and breathed deeply to clear the fuzziness at the edges of his head. The breeze on the street whipped most of the noxious cloud away and he returned to the lobby.
Tony Orange lay dead in the corner where he had first run, pummelled almost beyond recognition by the weight of lead he had been fed in such a short time. His killers were slumped on their raised platform at the top of a small flight of stairs. Stopping for a moment to pay his respects to another professional from the old days Mike walked up and pressed the button for the lift. When it came he dropped another sleep grenade with a ten second timer and got in, pressing eight uponwhich floor he knew the target’s offices to be.
In the lift he thought about Tony Orange. Tony was dead because he was here and should not have been. He was here because of an industrial accident, common enough in their industry, and Mike felt for him because he had had a similarly traumatic experience. He had been well treated but it seemed that it was not so for Tony and so he had flown up out of himself to the sky.
In the days before Mike had an eye linked to his support weapon he had relied on a virtual partner. The silver box was in control of the weapon and reconnaissance scanning. He had been liberating gold nuggets from a mining encampment in the desert and the support gun decided that the panic parameters had been met. It fired so many tracer rounds into the wooden building full of machinery that fire started in every corner. As the black night had become an orange oven Mike had felt his veneer of humanity stretch and rip under the pull of his own panic. Mike never willingly lit a fire after that night, not for warmth nor food nor fun nor business. Poor Tony he had clearly failed today through lack of funding, he had no number two and no heavy weapon.
As soon as Michael walked out of the lift he knew that someone had a camera in the lobby.
The eighth floor of the Black-Black and Newhampshire Holdings building was unlike other office space. Its layout was stark, two rooms, one huge room and a tiny panelled box on a far wall that guaranteed privacy for the occupant, the target.
The large room was mostly occupied by empty space and ten huge men who’s bodies were heavily adorned with armour, their flesh was threaded with reinforcing wires, paranoid and painkilling levels of dopamine surged artificially through their heads, they carried their numerous weapons with a surety and familiarity reminiscent of a child with a comfort blanket.
“Alright, Captain Kung-Fu, let’s see what you can do with that sword.”
With dignity Mr. Pathway rose to his full height, his breathing slowed and evened out. With a nasal exhalation and a downward bob he brought the blade out in a clean arc to his right, stopping, absolutely still, at a planned moment.
“It is my magic sword,” he said; and he went into a slow Kendo warm-up, which he rapidly sped up to keep the interest of his psychopathic audience.
He had studied the art of the katana as well as the use and, in blank-faced silence, he went through the moves as if for his master. He knew how impressive the sight of a true swordsman was in the age of guns but he wondered how long the hostility of his guests would lie low. Before they blew his un-armored body into bits he must complete a little mental trigonometry.
His left eye was still tuned to the cannon’s eye view from the conference centre and he raised the barrel until he was looking through the windows on the eighth floor of the target.
He thought that he was dead when one of the toughs raised his weapon to blow off his limbs but another of the group said,
“Nah, man, not yet, this is the real Kung-Fu.”
Mike could have kissed him for at that moment he caught sight of one big silver arm through the window. He adjusted the tuning of his eye so that the viewfinder of the cannon ghosted on top of his real vision and fixed his gaze on the easily identifiable owner of the massive chrome appendage. His eyes focus and calibrate. Tiny numbers at the periphery of sight spin downwards towards zero and lock.
The audience of killer toddlers is getting bored. Mike raises his sword in a dramatic fashion to keep their eyes fixed for a final moment. The thugs just start to laugh. Mike swings his sword, flat and horizontal, in a cancelling movement. The man with the chrome arm bursts, at nipple height. The three gorillas standing next to him lose their heads pop, pop, pop, and fall.
The well equipped killers look at him, to them he is still just a silly man with a sharp stick, baggy trousers and a heavy, flappy shirt, he is not death, yet, in their eyes. He swings another cancelling gesture over the other flank of his enemies and far away, at the end of a long street, the cannon thundered and tracked; thundered and compensated.
The kung-fu fan who had let him live was dropped with a single hole through the chest, most had been brained. Owing to the angle that the gun fired from floors nine to twelve had perforations in walls, floors and ceilings. Startling shafts of light tunnelled into the heart of the Black-Black and Newhampshire Holdings empire, where it had not fallen for many years.
Mike picked his way over the bodies and approached the panelled office that had remained untouched in his highly accurate spotted heavy weapon strike.
He pushed open the door with the tip of his katana and shrank back. With minute slowness he peeked around the door jamb. The target was in the room, at a glorious mahogany desk that may even have been real. He was slumped forward in the padded armchair and his forehead was resting on the polished wood, leaving a greasy mark. Mike slunk in behind him and examined him in his collapse.
A blue tag, a few millimetres long, protruded from his neck, his back was peppered with smashed blue fragments of the same material. Tony must have hit him with a needle, perhaps in the first dash through the blackout. Tony Orange had been a poisoner, as his file confirmed, and handsome Clark Newhampshire had made it to his office to die. Mike pushed him back in his chair with the blunt edge of his sword to make the decapitation easier.
The dead man had obviously suffered, by the look on his puffy face, and had torn at his clothing, exposing a weighty steel barrel around his torso and the tops of his artificially tanned thighs. His hands lay in spastic postures, one in his lap and the other trapped by the arm of the chair by his right leg. Mike placed his katana, quietly, on the desk and unrolled a large linen bag,  for the head. He took a disc from inside his robe and placed it beside the bag and the body. The disc was the size of a pair of circled hands and was designed to house the neck of a decapitated head, to continue the oxygenation and pumping of blood and to prevent a mess being made of the linen bag.
Mike picked up his katana and looked at his hands as he adjusted his grip for the clean stroke; such clean hands, so covered with blood.
He looked at the target and saw that it had drawn a pistol, silently, from a puckered pouch in the flesh of his thigh, and had the gun shakily levelled at him. Clark had only received a single dose of the combination toxic agent and though his death was certain, the moment of his death was not. In his body, behind the armour, chemicals were analysed and balancing agents were released, stores of concentrated blood cells were released to resupply his envenomed veins, complex neurological compounds streamed into his spine to lift his consciousness above the pain and destruction and numbness in his body.
Tony Orange had become a truly vindictive poisoner, however, and not all of the elements of his tags could be counteracted by the systems in Clark’s body, not all the elements of his tags had any known anti-toxin and his victims could not last long.
Whole sections of Clark’s body shut down as he attempted to co-ordinate sight, though and action. The gun was impossibly heavy and his eyes were going grey as if dusty milk was being poured into his aqueous humour off a spoon.
Mike saw him falter and with a stance change and a swoosh of mono-molecular sharpness he split the head from the body. He swiftly grabbed the head by the abundant black hair and slammed it into its housing on the disc.
Mike was glad to have found him alive as many tamper traps also detonate upon the death of the carrier. The disc would fool most life sensors and prevent that happening until he could get the head to Archie and his bomb disposal robots.
As he bagged up the head he idly wondered what it was that the previous owner had done to get Tony Orange on his tail. What things had this rich young thug with his glowing red tie done? The glowing red tie that was now outshone by the thick streams of blood down his elegant suit and fine, clean shirt, what had its wearer done? He did not know, the files in his head were empty, the viewfinder of the cannon could not show him but he ginned to think that some part of his brain lived on in sluggish torture within the head whilst he had it on the disc, in the bag, while he took it back to his employers, to be cut up and distributed.