Back in Kingston it was still raining with torrential force. Rook stomped through the station, dripping, exchanging nods with friends and ignoring the rest. HudVal was split, like most PDs between useful cops like Rook and legacy hires who were politicals and more trouble than they were worth. Rook and the legacies were somewhere between oil and water and cat and dog. They didn't mix well.

Rook's office was small, even cramped, but it was in the old part of the building, erected in 1920. The walls down here were brick, the ceilings were plaster and wood panel, the floors solid. In other words it was hard to bug and bugs showed up on any reasonable detection screen.

Beyond that it was hard to find. Strangers always had to ask directions twice and even Artoli wasn't entirely sure where it was. On its own this was a good enough reason to keep it. He'd been offered a nice corner spot in the new building with lots of windows and he'd turned it down. Anyone with a competent window reader could tune in conversation in a room like that, unless you used window vibrators and noise machines and pulsers and all sorts of complicated shit. Rook liked to try and keep his life simpler than that.

As soon as he'd sat down he'd put the yellow and black Nokia Supa on the desk top so it could scan the room. For a few seconds red and green lasers flashed here and there, along with a lot of invisible beams too. A half dozen monitoring devices that Venner had put in place coughed up their own micro-reports. Then the Nokia ran through it all and pronounced the office to be clean. The Nokia was worth every one of its N$2699, as far as Rook was concerned. Not only could it handle 42 phone lines at once, with data and/or voice on each, plus full encryption, but it carried a 40 exabyte micro-computer with a defiantly Scandinavian female personality. Left to its own devices, at night, it read 19th century literature and fought bitter doctrinal battles on the Strindberg forum on Newsnet.

Rook was already back on Schmoozer. He put out a call to his daughter, but she still wasn't around. Still at school? Had to be. Time diff with LA threw him sometimes. He felt restless. No day was quite right without their daily chat. It kept him sane in an insane world.

Lindi came in with his requested cup of coffee from the machine downstairs. HudVal PD coffee came in two forms. It was either a kind of tar, suitable for roofing repairs, or a watery fluid that might be good for fertilizing flowers. Nevertheless, Rook had a cup of the stuff on his desk. It looked like the watery version. As such it would do fine for what he needed. He knocked a couple of Anti-Oxi out of his dispenser and swallowed them with a gulp. He followed them with the Strethiomome spansule, big and bright pink, plus the little white Moxodenylan ion-channel cleanser.

Lindi chuckled at the resulting grimace then nodded towards the cup in his hand.

"Why do you drink that stuff?"

"Comes with the territory?"

"So did flat feet. Out of fashion now."

Lindi sipped from a purple bottle of something called p-Ump, a high end Nutraceutical beverage that was all the rage with her kind of ripped and toned weight lifters.

"Well, it does have caffeine. Somewhere."

"Terrible. Keep it up and you'll end up out there with the 'zads." She nodded to the window, where the rain drummed insistently. Rook's narrow, dirt encrusted window looked out over the parking lot to a stretch of Kingston Broadway. Most of Kingston was solidly gentrified now. Indeed it had been a hot real estate zone for more than a decade. Ever since Manhattan woke up to the fact that with the power rails on the big roads Kingston was barely 20 minutes away. But, this little stretch here, perhaps because of the confluence of the hospitals, the former schools and the police station was still down and out. The drugs dealt down there on the corners were new, all Synth-peptins and Narc-ethylans, not heroin and crack cocaine, but the business model was the same. These days the guns were 5s, not 9s. and the talk was all about "breakin'" and "junkin'" --- losing the omnipresent surveillance provided by RFIDs, SCs and all the other "Clips" that helped control the poor and the dangerous. But the ethic was the same as it had ever been. There was always "the Man", the gun, the money and the necessary dope.

"Caffeine's still legal, just."

Lindi grinned. Once again, Rook was glad he'd been assigned her as a partner.

Ingrid emitted a soft beep and flashed a green light from the main screen.

"Okay?"

"Done," came the cool, nordic, female voice.

"What have we got?"

"90% probability that Sangacha event is related to prior, and unknown political situation."

"Oh, isn't that just wunnerful. But, we already suspected something wasn't quite right."

"43% probability that Sangacha event was organized by private Corporation."

"That's the really bad news, then."

Lindi nodded, eyes thoughtful.

"8% probability that Sangacha event was inside work."

Lindi sighed. "There go all the easy options."

"From all available information you have 2% probability of finding perpetrators. "

Venner wished he was somewhere else far, far away.

"They're not going to like that upstairs," he said after a minute or so of reflection.

"The pressure is on, huh?" Lindi pushed away her purple bottle.

"You could say that. Told me to hand everything else over to Belison."

"Recipe for disaster."

"Well," he began. Lindi was right, but he couldn't avoid making an effort. "Bob's not that bad, but it means everything will just stand still."

Belison was a legacy cop, fat, white and pretty much useless. But he had political protection so he lingered on the HomSquad, doing very little and burning up a salary that could have been used on someone worth the money. Rook had learned to accept that in this era this was the way the world worked. Without legacies upper middle class unemployment would be politically explosive. Lindi, because she was young and ambitious didn't. see things that way.

She grimaced and looked out the window. Then shrugged it off. "Okay, so probability suggests we have a military hit of some kind?"

Rook nodded. Bad, bad news, the worst really. Politics and military matters entwined, this was like reaching into a dark cupboard for a hornets' nest that just happened to have a rattlesnake wrapped around it.

"Problem, uh, sir? We have no jurisdiction on military matters."

"Declared military matters."

"You mean, because the vic was retired, this isn't really MI's purview?"

"I guess."

They were both quiet for a few moments. Thinking the same thoughts.

"Okay," Rook put his hands on the table, palms down. "Let's think it through again."

If they were lucky this one would remain insoluble. A little less lucky and they'd get their hands blown off. Actual, outright unlucky meant actual dead. It was gonna be tricky to finesse.

"He retired, what, sixteen years ago?" Lindi made her points with an index finger and her palm. "Didn't use rank or title in daily life. Had very little contact with surviving family members, who all live out west. "

"That's the thing I don't quite get. Why live here? Where it still gets cold in the winter. Why avoid his family?"

"I asked them that."

"Yeah?"

Lindi flipped open her own handheld and read off the display.

"His younger sister, Rinarda Maria, lives in Albuquerque. Said "not surprised" when told that brother Manuel had been found shot dead. Later said "what a lousy bastard," and then shut up."

"Nothing like the love a family brings you."

"Something like that."

"Okay, his service record."

"Trimmed considerably, I'd say. But it's clear he ran a camp unit during the Walls."

"North or South?"

"This is gonna shock you, but somebody cut that bit out of the record."

"What a surprise. "

"Yeah." Lindi was studying her handheld. "We do know that he had his SCs removed and never replaced. Not even an insurance ID."

"Presumably, when he retired."

"Guess so. But, weird that he never had another put in."

"You've checked the insurance angle?"

"Not clear yet. "

"Uninsured? And living there?"

"I know. Very unusual. Checking to see if the building board knew."

"Does that mean he was hiding?"

"Well, maybe, but he didn't change his name."

"So, partially hiding?"

"How does that work?"

"Well, I guess it didn't."

"Right." Lindi put her handheld back on her belt.

"So," Rook drummed his fingers on his old metal desk. "Maybe he thought he had protection. The thing with the insurance and the SCs was some kind of personal statement?"

"Maybe. Lots of questions to ask, not many people to answer them."

Rook nodded again. In his experience that was always the way it went in a case involving the Military.

Suddenly he became aware of a throbbing sound. It grew rapidly louder until it became quite overwhelming.

A shadow fell across the parking lot, and out of the dark clouds came a swirling flash of red and green lights as a heavy duty gunship settled towards the parking lot. On the wet black sides were the letters F.B.I. in brilliant white.

Lindi was at the window. "Wow! Take a look at this shit."

Rook got up, caught a glimpse of the brutal thing descending from the sky. All angular planes, black refarb, stelthmat, green lights strobing so hard it hurt to look at.

It set down in the carpark and dropped a ramp out its back with a faint clang. A moment later a combat robot, a thing like a seven-foot-tall insect made of metal and expensive polymers, sprang out of the belly of the beast and assumed an erect, threatening posture.

The thing's head was a spinning disk about six inches deep, flat side up, covered in little ominous lights. Now it was mapping its surroundings, just in case. Below the slowly spinning head was a chestful of weaponry, ready to demolish the neighborhood at the slightest provocation.

"To overawe the natives, I presume."

Lindi took a few pix. "Have to show my boyfriend."

"I suppose I'm going to have visitors. Care to stick around?"

Lindi shook her head. "Thanks, but no thanks."

It took them a while to find him, but they did. He monitored their approach by making calls to friends with offices at the various floors along the way. John Gregor who ran the Intensive Adolescent Review Office briefed him best.

"Three of 'em, none of them really human."

So he was prepared when a Senior Special Agent and two First Agents appeared in the doorway.

Senior Special Agent Skelsa was six foot two at least, and had that multiple implants look. The head was square, the eyes were not natural. Skelsa was what they called an "Enhanced Human" or En-Hu. The First Agents were less obviously unnatural, but both had the inhuman eyes. Venner recalled hearing something about the FBI requiring agents these days to undergo enhancements if they wanted promotion.

From the desktop Ingrid was scanning them, just as they were scanning him. In his left ear the cool Scando voice reported a list of interesting items.

Senior Special Agent Skelsa had had the bones in his feet and hands treated to polymerize them. His skull had also been partially treated, perhaps in response to an injury.

He carried Subcutes, Elreds, Arfids, MADs and more specialized military type chips in both arms, shoulders, buttocks and thighs. A whole raft of Federal networks and systems knew where he was at any given moment.

There was a special device, the size of the top joint of a man's thumb inside Skelsa's abdomen, lodged between pancreas and large intestine. Ingrid didn't know what it was, but she was working on it. He also carried two guns, one in a conventional shoulder harness lodged under his left armpit, and the other strapped to the outside of his right leg, above the ankle.

"You are SIO Venner?" The voice was surprisingly warm, and artificial. All Special Agents had this Radio DJ voice, another implant. It made them sound friendly, even while they were threatening to tear your head off.

Rook avoided having his hand crushed by only offering his fingers.

"Please, sit down." He had two chairs and a bench, just enough room for these oversized humanoids.

"You know why we are here?"

"Nope," he lied.

"You are the lead investigator on the Sangacha case?"

"I see. Yes, I am."

"Good. What have you got?"

There was that famous cyborg bluntness again.

"Before I answer that question, I have to ask you if you've cleared this interview with Area Chief Artoli?"

"That is irrelevant."

Venner smiled. "For you, perhaps, but not for me."

Artoli wasn't picking up. For a moment Rook wondered if this was some kind of deliberate ploy. Was she leaving him to deal with the feds on his own? Lisa and he had rubbed along okay for the last few years. But she was notoriously fickle.

He left a message, keeping his voice as neutral as possible, though he was angry at being left to cope with this shit on his own.

Really, there was no alternative to telling them something. Albany might want him to forego cooperation with federal authorities, but Albany wasn't sitting in his chair with a bunch of half-human things on the other side of the desk. Fortunately, there was precious little to tell.

"So, to your question, Senior Special Agent Skelsa. What do we have? Well, the truth is we have hardly anything. We have the victim. We know that he fired a shotgun three times and wounded, possibly killed one of his attackers. We don't know how many attackers there were, and we have no leads as yet to their identities."

"DNA evidence?"

"Soon. But whether we'll get any matches or not I can't tell you."

"Right." Skelsa leaned forward. The act seemed threatening, even if it wasn't meant to be. "Put this on full priority, SIO. This shit is serious. I will be all over your ass on this one. General Sangacha was an important man. There are enemies of the state at work."

Venner felt his eyebrows bob upwards involuntarily. Enemies of the state, was not a heart warming phrase, nor something to lightly toss into conversation.

"No shit, well, I'm sure you know more about that than I do," he heard himself say, as he wondered what kind of beach this case was steering him towards. Unfortunately he had this feeling that said beach was not the kind made of golden sand, caressed by warm blue water, but rather the defended kind, with barbed wire all over, and guns, a helluva lot of them, in position to dispute any landing.

Something about the tone of his response had not satisfied Skelsa.

"Venner? You even think of fucking with me and you will find a size twelve Jimshoe jammed so far up your ass you'll be getting acid reflux in your goddamned oesophagus from it. You got that?"

Rook studied the furious, but inhumanly even features. Where the hell did they get them from? How had the younger Skelsa set out on the road to this? Were they programmed with this hardass bullshit?

"You know something, there's no need to roll out the nuclear arsenal here. I've got a job to do. You've got a job to do. As it happens, my entire case load has been shifted to another officer so I can concentrate on it."

Skelsa's biomechanical eyeballs seemed to subside back into his skull after a second or two. Rook could just about watch the blood pressure subside.

"Good. Let me know the minute you have the dna work. Place this number on your inside list."

A red light flashed on the Nokia's upper screen indicating a forced data input.

Ingrid's voice muttered in his left ear. "Violation of Security Code. Firewall activated." If a handheld could sound pissed off, the Nokia Supa did a good job of it.

Senior Special Agent Skelsa was back on his polymerized feet. Again Rook was careful to avoid getting his hand crunched.

"Keep in touch, Venner," the First Agents went out, scouting the corridor.

"Which way is the quickest?"

"Oh, go right, and keep going, at the first stairs go down two flights. Make a right there and you should see the outer lobby."

"Okay."

They were gone. Venner felt a little thrill at sending them the long way. It was rare for him to rebel like that, but it felt good.

No sooner were they out of sight, clumping along the brown linoleum to the stairs then he had Area Chief Artoli in his right ear.

"They've gone?"

Wondering if there was a bug in his office that Ingrid hadn't picked up, he took a slow, deep breath.

"Yeah, where were you"

She ignored that little thrust. "What did you tell them?"

"What I know. Not really much choice about it. Of course, I don't know very much at all, so it was a short conversation."

"You were told not to cooperate."

"Right. So you did want them to take me with them. Off to Camp Neutron for the rest of my days."

"Please, Rook, this is serious."

"Yes, Ma'am, couldn't agree more. I hear the food in Camp Neutron is pretty bad and the activities are, well, limited."

"Rook!"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you tell them?"

"That we didn't have anything much to go on."

"And?"

"They told me to cooperate or else, and to tell them as soon as the dna work is done."

"Which you will not do."

"Yeah?"

"That is an order."

"Okay, uh, sir."

"I'm sorry that I couldn't speak with them, myself. There's a lot going on, right now."

"Oh, of course. I understand." Venner kept the tone neutral enough so that Artoli didn't blow up at him again, though they both understood what he was saying.

Coward.

There was a sudden thunder of engines and the chopper lifted off from the car park, red lights strobing off the walls and windows as the huge metallic monster rose into the dark sky.

The rain continued to pour down without the slightest hint of a break. Rook wondered if there would be mudslides along Route 28. He made a note to get the Nokia to check for him.

"One question, Chief, when they come back, what do I do? How, exactly do I tell them that I'm not cooperating?"

"I don't know, Rook, you think of something."

Then she was gone again.

He had barely cooled down enough to think clearly about this when the Nokia informed him he had a call from Henkins, the Junior IO he'd left on the scene down in Peekskill.

"Yeah."

"Uh, sorry to, uh, well." Henkins was flustered by something.

"What's up?"

"Uh, we, uh, have another element to this thing."

"We do? Encrypt immediately."

"Yes sir."

A few moments of electronic warbling and tweeting followed as full Police encryption was set up. Rook wasn't at all sure that it would stand up to Fed decrypt, but it might and that could be important.

"What have you got?"

"Well, sir, we discovered that the vic had a storage locker on the second sub-basement."

"Yeah?"

"Punch code lock, so I put someone on it."

"That would be Crackers?"

"Yes, sir. She's the best we have."

"Right."

"It took a while but we got it open. Wow, it's amazing, sir."

"Yeah, what is it?"

"Well inside was a supersize dog carrier. Like the kind you'd use for a Great Dane?"

"Yeah?"

"And inside it was a Pleasure Model."

"Holy Cow!"

"It's a Pammy, sir. Name is Pleasure."

Rook whistled softly. Here was a whole other side to the dead General.

"How come the building didn't tell us about this?"

"They swear they didn't know."

"Christ. Okay, bring it up here. Leave Crackers in charge there."