The Credulity Nexus by Graham Storrs Page A

match.”
    The speaker
sounded nervous. He didn't take his eyes off Rivers for a
moment.
    “ Your boss didn't tell you to expect an
upload, did he?” It seemed like a reasonable guess. “Otherwise
you'd have come armed with something more than those little
pop-guns. Am I right?”
    “ You ain't indestructible,” the gunman
said.
    Rivers smiled.
“I'll give you points for bravado, but not for intelligence. Now
run along. I'm in a hurry. The cops are going to be here any– Oh,
shit!”
    The clatter of
heavy boots coming from the stairwells at both ends of the corridor
could only mean one thing.
    “ FBI! Lay down your weapons! Hands above
your heads! Do it! Now!”
    Federal agents
came storming into the corridor from both directions, shouting the
same instructions over and over. Cordell's thugs turned to face the
ones behind them. Celestina's men did the same, leaving Rivers and
Brie in the middle. It took Rivers a fraction of a second to weigh
up the situation. The Feds were wearing state-of-the-art body
armour. Neither she nor the hired guns had a weapon that would do
more than inflict a few bruises on them. On the other hand, the FBI
had clearly been expecting to meet an upload. They had heavy-duty
machine guns which could, she knew, be loaded with armour-piercing,
explosive munitions. In addition, they had buzz guns, which fired a
stream of tiny hypersonic pellets that would cut through her body
like a laser torch through tinfoil.
    Getting away
with the woman was out of the question. She'd be lucky to get away
with her life. But she wasn't going to let them take her.
    The Feds were
still shouting and the goons were still wondering what to do.
Rivers raised both her guns, pointed them at both groups of FBI
agents at once, and fired.
    It took a
moment for people to react, and then all hell broke loose. But in
that moment, Rivers dropped her guns and launched herself at the
corridor wall. It was an internal wall, just studs and
plaster-board. Using the grip of her gecko-skin soles as leverage,
and the amazing strength of her wonderful new body, she smashed her
way through it with very little effort. While the Feds and the
goons exchanged fire, she sprinted across the ward in which she
found herself, tossed a resuscitation trolley through a window and
climbed out through the hole it made onto the outer wall of the
building.
    By the time
the police had fought their way past the gunmen and followed her,
she was long gone.
    -oOo-
    “ So who do you really work for?” Rik asked
as he and Freymann waited in the van.
    The woman
looked at him with intelligent brown eyes and gave a small shrug.
“MI6. It was Shah's idea. Bring you over here, get hold of the
package, and take it home.”
    “ Shah's Five, right?”
    She gave a
cock-eyed grin. “Inter-agency co-operation. It happens
sometimes.”
    “ But you're really an American, yeah? No
Brit does a New York accent that good.”
    “ As American as you are.”
    Rik wondered
if that was a dig at him. He'd taken lunar citizenship when he
married the Drew sisters. Now he had dual nationalities. “No
conflict of interest?”
    “ Nya. We're all on the same side these
days. Americans, Europeans, Aussies, Canadians, Lunies... Even the
Russians are on the side of the Angels since the reforms. The
sooner they declare a world government, the better, if you ask me.
The real divisions aren't national any more. The lines we draw now
are based on political systems and religions.”
    Rik took a
closer look at the woman opposite him. He was starting to see more
there than he had expected to find.
    “ That still doesn't explain why you're
working for the Brits and not the home team.”
    She gave him a
steady look. “See the beaky nose? The swarthy skin? I got them from
my Iranian, Muslim mother, not my whiter-than-white Jewish father.
America's still too tangled up with Middle Eastern politics to
completely trust someone with my background. For the Brits,
petro-politics is all history