That would pin down a few. I looked to my right and saw the pulse cannon on the roof of the closest tenement. Two men in militia uniforms hunkered down over it. Another fiddled with the generator. The telescopic insert on my HUD showed me the two-day stubble on his lined face.

Orbital had not given me an override, so no targeting reticules appeared around his head. I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. I pointed the Magnum. I squeezed the trigger. The gunner’s head exploded. A telescopic lens close-up from Dave showed me the other two staring at each other. They had that oh shit look people get when somebody well-known to them has just died suddenly and violently.

I sprinted through the still glowing hole the plasma cannon had left and across the open ground between the buildings. Bullets trailed me all the way. Some of them pinged off my armor. The militiamen caught a flash of white as I broke their world’s record for the thirty-meter lurch and stagger. Some days I am grateful for having been pumped full of illegal super-soldier drugs in my misspent youth. Some days.

I dove through the doorway. It was dark on the ground floor. According to the induction briefing, the Aryan Jihad had blown up the generators to cut power to the Temperance Legion. The Temperance Legion had destroyed the sanitation because the Radical Orthodox were using the processing plant as a headquarters. The Radical Orthodox took out the water systems in reprisal. Once these civil strife situations get out of hand things get messy. Smelly too.

My helmet’s nightsight amplification cut in. The ground floor of the shop became a ghostly wash of gray. Packages of food lay scattered all over a broken counter. There were some cans of beer as well. I thought about picking one up for later but decided against it. The way my day was going, I’d probably be charged with shoplifting.

The stairs loomed ahead of me, and I went up them double time. The two militiamen were still on the roof. One of them crouched over the corpse I had left. The other was staring over the wall, trying to get a glimpse of me.

“Tata? Tata?” The teenager slumped over the corpse.