Drawn by the gunfire, a squad of body-armored camp security came scuttling up the street, clinging to the cover of building edges and stopped vehicles like so many man-size beetles. Sunlight gleamed on their dull blue chest carapaces and the tops of their helmets, glinted off the barrels of the short, blunt assault rifles they carried. They were as silent as beetles, too—in all probability, their gh-stamped riot gear and weaponry came with an induction mike and coms link package. He imagined it from their point of view. Hushed, shocked voices on the wire. Goggle-eyed vision.

They found Carl seated cross-legged on the steps up to the prefab’s front door, hands offered outward, palms up. It was a tanindo meditation stance, one he’d learned from Sutherland, but he was anything but meditative. The effects of the mesh were ebbing now, and the pain from his injured side was beginning to creep back. He breathed through it and kept his body immobile. Watched intently as the security squad crept up the street toward him. He’d set out the Haag pistol and his Agency license in the street a good four or five meters away from where he sat, and as soon as the first armored form nosed up to him, assault rifle slanting down from the shoulder, he lifted his hands slowly into the air above his head. The boy in the riot gear was breathing harshly; under the helmet and goggles his young face was taut with stress.

“I am a genetic licensing agent,” Carl recited loudly in Spanish. “Retained under contract by UNGLA. That’s my authorization, lying there in the street with my gun. I am unarmed.”

The rest of the squad moved up, weapons similarly leveled. They were all in their teens. A slightly older squad leader arrived and took stock, but his sweat-dewed face didn’t look any more confident. Carl sat still and repeated himself. He needed to get through to them before they looked inside the ’fab. He needed to establish some authority, even if it wasn’t his.