"You came here to discuss your debt, right?" she asked.

"Yes. But with Josh."

"Shut the fuck up. For a welsh this size Josh has come to me."

"Who—"

Suzi split her lip in a winter grin. "You really wanna know?"

"No," he whispered.

"Good, maybe you're beginning to realize how deep you're in, boy. Let me lay it out for you, we're gonna get that money back, every penny. My people had a lot of practice at that, never failed yet. Why we get called in. Two ways, hard and soft. Hard: first we clean you out, flat, furniture, bank, the same with that little slut you hang out with, then we start working down your family tree. We see that Morrell gets to know, they fire you, you're instant unemployable."

"Oh, Jesus." Chris Brimley covered his face with his hands, rocking back and forth in the chair.

"Think maybe I'd better tell you the soft before you piss yourself," Suzi said.

Suzi halted the cockroach below a toilet downpipe. Her implant's time function told her it was eleven thirty-eight. Ninety seconds behind schedule, not bad at all.

Climbing up the downpipe was slow going. She had to concentrate hard, picking ridges for a secure foothold. Two metres. There was a rim where the concrete pipe slotted into a stainless-steel one.

She stood the cockroach on its back legs, pressing it against the smooth vertical wall of stainless steel. Her perspective made it seem at least a kilometre high. Three snail-skirt buds on the cockroach's underbelly flared out and stuck to the silvery metal. It began to slide up the featureless cliff face.

"Pull the ionic streaming data from Morrell's research mainframe and squirt it into your cybofax," Suzi told an aghast Chris Brimley.

"What? I can't do that!"

"Why? Codes too tough?"

"No. You don't understand. I can't take a cybofax into the research block. Hell, we're not even allowed to wear our own clothes inside; security makes us change into company overalls before we enter. We're scanned in and out."