Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams

off-shifts due to lack of traffic. Stunned by the impact, Aiah bounces off the gate, then tries to rip open the zipper on her tote because she knows at this point her only hope is the plasm waiting in the batteries.
    The skinny kid runs up before she can drag the zipper open. Aiah swings her tote and smashes him in the chest with its weight. He gives a yell and falls. And then the fat man is on her and smashes her full in the face with a fist the size of a ham. Starshells burst inside Aiah’s skull and she goes backwards, cracking the back of her head against the barred gate. Her hard hat clatters on the concrete. Aiah falls in a sprawl of arms and legs and hugs the tote to her chest, trying to protect herself as boots and fists begin to fall. Pain explodes her nerves as a metal toe-cap connects with a kidney. Aiah finds the zipper with her hand and tugs, pushes her hand inside the tote. Someone’s hand gropes her crotch. The fat man aims a boot at her face and misses, sitting down suddenly as he overbalances with the force of his kick. A beer bottle clatters on the floor. Aiah feels a plastic safety cap under her fingers and pulls it off the battery terminal. Touches her thumb to the battery.
    The skinny kid screams as a ball of plasm melts his face. His hair pomade explodes into fire. The fat man is halfway to his feet before Aiah gestures at him with her free hand, a gesture like a fist, and the fat man flies backward as if hit in the chest by a wrecking ball. Aiah can hear the crack of his head as it hits the far wall.
    The third man, the bottle thrower, stares in horror at the burning boy, and then clumsily, drunkenly, turns to run. Aiah points at him and gives him a push between the shoulder blades, a shove that flings him skidding face-first onto the concrete.
    Aiah staggers upright, half-blinded by tears and pain, and finds her hat. The skinny kid is clutching at his liquefied eyeballs and staggering down the corridor, shoulder thudding against the wall. For some reason the hair pomade is burning bright blue. Clumsy with pain and the weight of her tote, Aiah runs past him, past the other man lying on his face, and out of the tunnel into bright Shieldlight.
    The old brick buildings reel around her. She takes a deep breath of free air and staggers down the street, looking wildly for a cab. Screams keep echoing out of the tunnel. Aiah pulls her hat down over her face.
    Aiah finds a cab on the next block and asks to be taken to Mudki, a financial and business district fairly close by. One side of her face is swollen and she turns it away from the driver. The Transit Authority’s Mudki Station is a complex of different intersecting tracklines and pneuma stations and will be open at all hours; the tangle is complex enough for her to disappear in there, take the Red Line to the New Central Line and home.
    Covering her trail. At least her mind seems to be working along fairly rational lines. Unless the authorities deploy a plasm hound, she should get away free. Until she returns to Terminal, of course. There will be people looking for her, maybe some very serious people.
    By the time she arrives at Mudki she’s trembling so hard that she spills her change on the floor of the cab. She bends down, picks it up, pushes it across the wide shelf behind the driver’s seat. As she walks beneath Mudki’s fortress tower office blocks, she slips a hand into her tote to give herself a dose of plasm, tries to burn away her jolt of adrenaline, the liquid fear pouring like acid through her veins. The plasm helps to clarify her mind. As the Red Line car jolts away, Aiah coldly plots her next moves. Evasive methods of getting back to the old Terminal Station, procedures for avoiding anyone who could identify her.
    It can be done. And with luck it only needs to be done once.
    The sensation of clinical detachment lasts until she gets home, until she sees the gleaming yellow light of her communications array.
    She presses the play button,