Cuttler was taller in person than Butcher expected. His broad shoulders filled out the duffle coat and although Butcher could still see a softness in the cheeks beneath his thick beard, the pizza-induced flabbiness visible in his file photos was gone. The glyph over his head had expanded, the brackets filled with a single word: [MANCER]. He was confident - even threatening - as he stared from the puddle of light, breath puffing into the night’s chill.

Butcher let the comforting roughness of the pistol grip settle into his palm and forced himself to relax.

‘Mister Cuttler?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘You’re a hard man to find, for sure. But I’m actually looking for your sister, Cally. I’ve been hired by a company in the music business -’

‘Bullshit, Parsons,’ snapped Cuttler. ‘You were in Cheltenham looking for me and then knocking on my Mum’s door looking for Cally? That wouldn’t fool me even if you didn’t have your procedural status over your head. You are literally wearing your guilt.’

‘Fine, I’m looking for you,’ agreed Butcher. ‘But you need to let Emmy know to stay away from the unit. BRS knows it’s there, now, and they’ll put two and two together soon enough. I don’t think Ball will be as copacetic as I am when he sees that she’s had your procedure.’

‘So who are you working for, Parsons?’ asked Cuttler, shifting on his feet. Butcher could see the nervousness, now, behind his bravado. Cuttler was giving good front, but this wasn’t his natural territory. He was a long way outside his comfort zone and had been for a long time. But for Butcher, this was just another day at the office.

‘I work for the government, Ron,’ said Butcher. ‘I’ve been investigating allegations that BRS is developing a sophisticated bio-weapon for Britain’s enemies and I feel certain that you know what I’m talking about. We can protect you, Ron, if you come in.’

Cuttler was growing more agitated by the second, shifting from foot to foot, and Butcher suddenly thought to wonder if the runaway programmer had his hands in his pockets for some reason other than the cold. He cursed himself for not considering the possibility that Cuttler was armed. Of course he was armed! If Butcher had thought Ball was sketchy enough to want to get strapped, Cuttler had to think the same. He knew what Ball and BRS were capable of far better than even Butcher did.

‘You’re a fucking liar, Parsons,’ snarled Cuttler, ‘if that’s even your name! You’re wearing a procedural status! You’ve had the procedure! You work for BRS!’

‘I was undercover in the human trials programme!’ shouted back Butcher. ‘It was the only way to find out what they were doing!’

Butcher amazed himself at the speed with which he was pivoting his story to something even halfway credible. The lies were lining up already like the rounds in a magazine, ready for him to shoot them out. He had always been good under pressure, but this was another level of black belt dissembling and he could only think about that Bluff 3 score he was carrying and wonder if the nanoids were somehow mustering into action the pathways in his brain that made lying easy.

‘A government branch spying on their own defence contractors?’ Cuttler replied eventually, still nervous. ‘Who is it? Who do you work for?’

‘We’re a top secret joint task force,’ Butcher insisted. ‘MI5 has the lead, with technical expertise from GCHQ, but I’ve been seconded from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. I’m just a soldier, Ron. I do observations. They picked me for the human testing infiltration because I was expendable. But now I’ve got these...things inside me and in my head, and all of a sudden I’m their primary field asset.

‘Please,’ he went on, painting an expression of desperate confusion onto his face with a skill he hadn’t had two days ago. ‘Just come in with me. Help me understand what they’ve done to me, Ron.’

Cuttler looked at him and, then, somehow, Butcher sensed that Ron was looking at more than just him, as if he were looking deeper, past his eyes and into his brain, and…

Shit! Cuttler could see his stats and skills somehow!

‘Bluff Three?’ breathed Cuttler.

Before Cuttler could run, Butcher was on top of him, relinquishing his grip on the pistol to grab the programmer by the throat, driving him up against the wall even as he grabbed his wrist, keeping his hand in his pocket with whatever he had in there. It suddenly dawned on Butcher that, for someone planning on capturing and abducting another human being, he was astonishingly short on restraints. He didn’t have so much as a roll of gaffer tape on him, let alone plastic ties or a pair of decent cuffs. He was going to have to get physical.

But he felt Cuttler’s left fist drive hard into his ribs. It was a bad angle and the smaller man had little to no leverage but it was still a solid impact and Butcher was forced to drop his elbow to block the follow-up. But then, without the leverage of Butcher’s hand on his throat, Cuttler twisted his right hand out of his pocket and whatever he had in there burned!

Butcher yelled and pushed Cuttler away, clutching at the seared flesh on his left wrist. He swore as he thrust his hand back into his pocket and brought it back with the Browning. But, even as he worked the slide, Cuttler was running. What had looked like a dead end proved no obstacle to Cuttler, as he scrambled over a fence with an improbable speed, Butcher close on his heels.

Butcher dropped down into the garden beyond, just in time to see Cuttler ducking out through a gate at the bottom, and he dived after him, out into an alleyway running along the backs of two rows of houses, walls on either side separated by an obstacle course of wheelie bins and old pushchairs. Cuttler was already running, pulling anything he could into the space behind him, but Butcher leaped and dodged as fast as he could and, when he saw Cuttler look back, the programmer had barely gained any ground. Cuttler paused and, for a second, Butcher thought he was about to surrender when he suddenly saw him make the shape of a pistol with… his finger?

It was only at the very last instant that Butcher realized that the tip of Cuttler’s finger was glowing white hot, and threw himself to one side as a crackling pulse of light whipped through the air, passing his shoulder by an inch and leaving a smell like a steel works behind it.

Butcher didn’t stop to marvel at what he’d just seen, instead raising his pistol and firing two shots at Cuttler’s already-turned back. The noise of the shots in the dark alley nearly deafened him, but he ignored the ringing of his ears to gawp at the sight of the twin impacts - both textbook centre of mass - evaporating in a crackling spiderweb of blue light.

Before Butcher’s brain could process what he had seen, his body was already moving. But the moment of delay had given Cuttler time to reach the end of the alley, turn right and disappear. And by the time Butcher reached the point at which he’d last seen Cuttler, the street was empty and he could see a dozen escape routes in easy reach, with no sign of which one had been Cuttler’s.

The gunshot would have been heard, he thought, catching his breath as his heart thumped in his ear. Would they know what it was, around here? It was close to Aldershot. Lots of military types. Best to make himself scarce.

He ran back along the alley they’d run down and found himself just a few yards away from the takeaway, the plastic bag containing his dinner still lying on the damp pavement. With silent swearing running through his head, he snatched up the bag and marched swiftly away, back towards the AirBnB.

Weapon Handling 3

*

‘Have you classed yet?’

‘No,’ Emmy replied, her voice low, hiding at the far end of the corridor away from the changing rooms. ‘I’m training like mad. My five k time is getting down to a point where I could be a Team GB contender and I could probably take on a UFC heavyweight in a cage fight, but I’m seeing nothing in the class bracket. You told me I should’ve broken through by now.’

‘I told you it was experimental,’ replied Ron. He sounded stressed to Emmy - more than he had sounded when she’d told him about Parsons poking around. She had pressured Connor into confessing that he’d taken Parsons’s money to set them up. He’d sworn he’d never do it again, but she’d told him he could do it whenever he liked - just to make sure she knew in advance and got half of whatever he got. ‘They’re matching your physical and mental parameters against the templates I gave them, but if my studies are right, those templates are much more fluid than I planned for them to be. It means the nanoids are adjusting them in the same way as they adjusted your default stats.’

‘So I might never class?’ she demanded, aghast.

When Ron had first told her about his work, it had been the night she had found him passed out at his PC from a mix of alcohol and painkillers. She’d made him throw up and slapped him around a bit, but he’d still been half asleep as he told her in semi-coherent snatches about a technology that could create literal superheroes. The moment he’d sobered up, she’d insisted he make her his test subject, but then Ron had told her the rest: who BRS really were and what the nanoids could do - both to help, but also to harm and to control if they were left at the mercy of Ball and people like him.

Between them, they had worked out that the only way to prevent it from happening was to somehow make the nanoids programming both fixed and chaotic, so that neither Ball nor anyone else could make them work any differently from how they were first injected and that exactly how they worked would be unpredictable.

‘We knew that introducing an element of chaos into their behaviour was going to lead to some unpredictable outcomes,’ Ron pointed out to her. ‘I only broke through because I abused my admin privileges.’

‘Can you do the same for me?’ she asked. ‘Come on, Ron. You owe me.’

‘I know, but I can’t,’ Cuttler replied. ‘I closed that backdoor as soon as I used it. Otherwise it would’ve been used against us eventually. But I do have a working hypothesis that could help.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s a feature in the software called “feats”, which kick in when the nanoids sense some particularly life-changing achievement. The parameters are fixed and don’t seem to be changing, but I think the class upgrade and feats systems have become connected.’

‘So to class, I have to achieve a feat of some sort?’

‘Strictly speaking,’ said Cuttler, ‘success is optional. But it does require a tremendous and sustained period of effort with a massive endorphin pay-off.’

‘Like running a marathon?’

‘Like running a marathon three times in half an hour, while being chased by a ninja,’ said Ron. ‘The idea behind a feat isn’t to reward your everyday user. It’s to mark out the real high performers.’

‘So only the big heroes get classes?’ she asked. ‘That doesn’t sound like how you planned it?’

‘No, and, like I said, it’s unpredictable,’ Cuttler pointed out. ‘What’s certain is that performing a feat will guarantee a class. Otherwise, it’s a numbers game - the longer you do something, the more likely you are to hit the classing parameters by sheer chance. Some users might class on day one. Others might never class.’

‘So what am I supposed to do for a feat?’ she asked. She had intended the question to be rhetorical, but then Cuttler replied:

‘I… might have a suggestion.’

He sounded hesitant and uncertain, which wasn’t like him. At least, it wasn’t like he’d been in the last few months. Hesitant uncertainty had certainly been a lot like Ron when she’d first met him. But it had been a weird time.

‘I’m listening,’ she told him.

‘This guy, Parsons, is inside the system,’ he said. ‘The nanoids recognize him as being part of it, so interactions with him should be far more likely to prompt a dramatic response.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘I got a level in Bluff after I met him for the first time.’

‘He’s got three levels in Bluff.’

‘Three? Holy shit! The guy’s like a lying machine!’

‘The scale goes up to ten, remember,’ replied Cuttler. ‘But yes, he’s about as good as he can get without classing. If he were living an assumed identity for weeks or months at a time, he might get up to four or five, but that’s the limit without the nanoids doing more to enhance his performance.’

‘What would that even look like?’

‘Pray you never have to find out,’ said Ron. ‘Because we really need to take him out of the picture, and it could be your pathway to classing.’

‘You want me to… what?’ asked Emmy, uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking. ‘Kill him?’

‘I’ll be honest,’ said Cuttler, sighing. ‘Much as I hate the idea, it might be necessary. I met him and saw his stats. As a normal human, he’s plausible, violent and armed. But with the procedure, he’s basically our first supervillain. You might have knocked him about on the mat but if it came to a fight to the death, he’s at least your equal. And I suspect he’s got more experience than you when it comes to actual killing.’

‘Shit, Ron, I can’t do that.’

‘He’s not the person you think he is, Emmy,’ Ron reminded her. ‘I know he came over all reasonable and considerate - even likeable. But that’s his Bluff skill talking. He’s good. He’s really good. I got away with my life by the absolute skin of my teeth. And he knows where my mum lives. If you capture him instead of killing him… what the hell would we do with him?

‘But if you can even do that… You know, it’s a problem we can deal with. But I’m absolutely certain it will help you to break through. You’d class, and you’d open up the pathway beyond level four and stats beyond ten.’

Emmy thought about it.

‘He’s a big guy,’ she said eventually. ‘He knows how to fight. And I publicly whipped his ass the other day. Could work for a cover story if it all goes tits up.’

‘You’ll do it?’

‘Where is he?’

*

Butcher was running.

Specifically, he was stamping his way around an eleven kay route at the northern end of the New Forest, on his fourth circuit and about to finish a marathon distance in under three hours. The performance wasn’t superhuman, by a long way. There were professional and world-class runners who would still be crushing him. But he had been building up his pace from the start and had settled into a loping stride that left him feeling like he could eat up the miles for days. He couldn’t remember the last time he had run for pleasure, but the endorphin feedback this was giving him - the only thing he could remember that even came close was the one time he’d been shot. It had been a lucky bullet for the Afghan mujahid who’d taken a pot-shot at the passing Chinook, but the paper-thin superstructure had been no protection and the 7.62mm AK round had gone clean through his calf and taken a chunk out of his shin bone.

The pain had been intense, but the medic in the team had been sitting next to him at the time and he’d been out of his face on morphine in under a minute, spending the rest of the two-hour flight in a drugged-up haze of warm happies.

This was the same sense of elation, with none of the haptic detachment the morphine had enveloped him in.

He saw the car park ahead and began to slow his pace down, coming to a stop as he passed the wooden barrier and walking slowly back to the car, his knees wobbly and his lungs burning, but none of it leaving him feeling like he couldn’t have done it all again if he’d had to.

After the previous day’s failure, it felt good to take a break and clear his head, not to mention taking the nanoids for a more demanding test-drive than he’d given them in the Cheltenham gym. He was starting to think that his lie to Cuttler the previous evening had possibly had, at the heart of it, the germ of a surprisingly good idea. His military career might be mud, but the boys and girls of Century House were a good deal less discriminating in their choices of recruit - especially when it came to deniable paramilitary assets. With the nanoids, perhaps he could bargain his way to an official new identity that never needed to trouble the white knights of the Metropolitan Police.

But, on the other hand, if what he was getting was just what any subject of the Cuttler procedure could get, why would Six want to deal with damaged goods like him? They could put any of their existing assets through the procedure and get the same outcome for a fraction of the risk.

Of course, it was possible that Six didn’t actually know about BRS. Ball had suggested he had investors from all over the world. The kind of thing that the nanoids could do would be the sort of thing tech billionaires and Russian oligarchs would love to keep all to themselves - to create a new breed of superhuman, immune to disease and injury, faster, stronger and better than the ordinary crush. Ball seemed to genuinely think he was going to change the world, but if Butcher’s well-honed bullshit sensor was pointing due money, then the odds were that BRS was just going to fossilize the haves and have-nots into a permanent arrangement of gods and mortals.

The idea of it pissed him off something chronic, which was a great time for Ball’s name to appear on his frantically buzzing phone.

‘What now?’ asked Butcher, leaning against the car and letting the drizzle settle on his hot skin.

‘You’re still in Hampshire,’ said a female voice - it was Cook. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I found Cuttler,’ said Butcher, evenly.

‘That’s fantastic!’ replied Cook, the delight clear in her tone. ‘But why -? Oh, I see. He got away, didn’t he?’

‘Got away!?’ snarled Butcher. He had mostly got over it, but Cook had given him a useful target for the frustration that had burned at him - quite aside from the actual serious burn on the inside of his left wrist - most of last night and he was going to put it to good use. ‘He shot at me with his fucking fingers! And when I returned fire, it only turns out he’s bloody bulletproof! I was told the nanoids made humans stronger and faster not turned them into Merlin the fucking wizard of Mondor!’

‘It’s Gondor,’ said Cook, wearily.

‘What?’

‘Gondor,’ replied Cook. ‘Or possibly Mordor. And you mean Gandalf. Merlin is King Arthur. Gandalf is Tokein.’

‘He shot at me - with - his - fingers!’

‘OK,’ sighed Cook. ‘That’s surprising but not entirely unexpected. Theoretically, when the nanoids are sufficiently integrated with a user, they can manifest effects on the exterior. We didn’t think it should be possible for Ron to do it. Our reports suggested that it would take years of familiarity and training.’

‘Who wrote the reports?’ asked Butcher, climbing behind the wheel of the car and letting the hands-free pick up the call.

‘...’

‘It was Cuttler, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Cook agreed. ‘It was Cuttler. But what did you mean about returning fire? Are you… armed? How in God’s name did you manage that?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Butcher, checking the glove compartment that he was, indeed, armed. ‘And don’t you worry about how, Miss Cook, or even what with. Ball… acquired my services because he wanted someone resourceful, skilled, deniable and, of course, expendable. I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t armed. And it turns out my target’s armed, too. Literally. How is that possible?’

‘Where was Cuttler?’ she asked.

‘I rattled some cages and he came looking for me, in Camberley, Surrey.’

‘So what are you doing in the New Forest?’

‘Well, it turns out that these freaky little beetlezoids you put into my brainpan can do some pretty weird shit that I hadn’t planned for,’ replied Butcher, starting the engine and pulling away from the car park. ‘I thought it made sense to find out a bit more about how they work and what they can do. My target has edges I can’t even begin to work out. If I’m going to bring you the man you want, I need to know more about how this shit works. So are you going to keep avoiding the question or can I stop wasting time on experiments?’

There was a lengthy silence on the other end of the line, but Butcher could tell she was still there.

‘Fine,’ she agreed at last. ‘Like I said, the nanoids can potentially manifest external effects. That is, they can leave your body through your skin and do stuff on the outside that they couldn’t do on the inside. It’s painful and risky, and our assumption was that it took years of experience and training to even get to that point, but Ron’s only had the nanoids for two months. So either he was lying to us or he knows some sort of backdoor way to accelerate his use of the nanoids.’

‘What kind of modern programmer doesn’t put backdoors in their work these days?’ said Butcher, following the signs for Frimley.

This was, again, met with no answer from Cook. But Butcher refused to be drawn. When it came to maintaining an awkward silence, he was up there with the best.

‘Fine,’ said Cook, refusing to acknowledge the point. ‘But you should have stayed on him if you knew he was in the area. He might have gone to his mum’s house, or his brother’s.’

‘What part of “shoots fire from his fingers” and “bulletproof” are you not understanding?’ retorted Butcher. ‘I had new intelligence and needed to take stock. If you and your shady boss had made the effort to give me the information you already had, so I could properly assess the risks, I might already have him!’

Butcher chose to gloss over the fact that he’d failed to think of buying restraints. He now had a set of plastic ties in a pocket and the roll of gaffer tape in the boot.

‘So what is your plan?’ she asked. ‘I can see you’re on the move.’

‘I’m heading to his mum’s house again,’ said Butcher. ‘I rattled his cage once and got a result. It probably won’t work twice, but I can’t see a good reason not to try it, while I’m in the area. After that, I’ll pursue the plan I had before he turned up and ruined my dinner.’

‘Which is?’

‘His sister.’