Provenance I - Flee The Bonds by V J Kavanagh Page B

air. Booths lined three walls, their leather seats and glass topped tables changing colour beneath the whirling strobe lights. Another blue crystalline bar lined the far wall.
    Steve weaved his way to the bar, veered left and jostled through the humid mass. At the end of the bar, he broke free from the crowd and headed to a booth. The blond haired Paul waited in the unlit corner, gripping the edge of the glass table. Steve eased in opposite.
    Paul leaned into the light. ‘It’s a trap.’
    Steve froze. Paul’s blotched face grimaced, blood flowed freely from his nostrils, and the whites of those hardened blue eyes had crazed into a myriad of red lines. ‘Go!’
    Steve jerked up and pushed back into the crowd. He didn’t look back. He knew what was coming.
    Behind him, a woman’s scream ripped through the melodic beat. Steve twisted his head and peered over the crush of bodies. Light flitted across Paul’s tortured face and glinted in his solid black eyes.
    Steve spun around and ploughed through. Before he reached the other end of the bar, the music stopped and the soft colourful lights flickered into a hard glare. Those closest to the stairs surged back, the hum intensified, everyone turned towards it, their silence broken only by the occasional whimper.
    A Prefect rose from the stairwell.
    Fidgeting increased, eyes widened, glossy lips quivered in pallid faces. For many it would be their first encounter with a Prefect, but everyone remembered the playground stories. Prefects were the bogeymen. If you misbehaved, they would come for you in the night. They never forgot, or forgave.
    The Prefect ascended three metres above the floor, its hum reverberating in the brittle silence. It pivoted, sweeping the petrified with its gelid eye. A red light on its indicator panel stopped blinking.
    Instinctively the crowd parted as the Prefect glided overhead to where Paul had fallen. It hovered over the body for a few seconds before gliding back and taking position next to two CONSEC Blue Defenders.
    One of the Defenders raised his hand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the party’s over for this evening, please leave in an orderly manner.’
    The Prefect’s indicator panel resumed its blinking.
    Steve shuffled with the crowd towards the Defenders. In his periphery, the stub of a plasma cannon glinted from the Prefect’s weapons port — its Controller had expected to find someone. Through air tainted with a metallic twang, he followed the procession down. At the bottom, the anxious crowd propelled him out onto the pavement and quickly dispersed.
    He stood still and drew cool night air deep into his lungs. Then it was time to leave.
    From inside the transit stop shelter, Steve watched Mitzy’s neon sign fizzle out. In the light of the doorway, the Defenders faced the blue-suited doormen. A shadow passed over them; the Prefect hadn’t left either.
    Steve climbed aboard the bus and flopped into a seat. Paul’s contorted face remained wedged in his mind. The subconjunctival haemorrhaging, bleeding nose and dark blotches were all symptoms of acute nanossasin poisoning. Millions of biomechanical nanobytes coursed through the blood stream, their absorbable outer case dissolved and a biochemical reaction produced the nano-explosion. Only SIS Prosecutors used it, only Prosecutors would want to. But why Paul?
    Stepping off at Paddington, he counted ten paces before spinning around to face the woman in the red duffle coat, her frizzy blonde hair framing a proud Gallic nose. He walked towards her, holding up the shimmering ID card in his left hand and the BRD activated MCD in his right. He thought her smile incongruous considering the circumstances.
    ‘Why are you following me?’ Steve sniffed, and tensed.
    ‘I do not follow you.’ She tilted her head. ‘Perhaps it is you who follow me?’
    A few minutes later, Steve watched her walk away. She’d authenticated. Martine Soucy from Boussac-Chezel. No CPF, no interest from CONSEC. She’d been