Shadowplay

CELL 30

Shadows flickered from house to house; night in the Maka quarter was busier than a broken anthill. Flits whined overhead, stabbing searchlights into the murk, missing with an impatient inevitability everything they were trying to find. Squads of kipaos marched with equally ineffectual arrogance through the potholed, twisting streets of the Quarter, shining the beams of their hand lumens into the sidestreets, blind alleys, the barred windows, and the recessed doorways of the crumbling structures that passed as houses In this part of the sprawling city; they were terrified, sweating with it and stinking, despite their armor and their weapons and the poverty of the people they were hunting. The smells, the shadows that moved in the corners of their eyes but vanished when they swung round to confront them, the miasma of rage and hatred that stirred like smoke in the rancid air, all this spooked them more and more; several times a number of the younger recruits shot holes out of the air or blew up piles of garbage. They were growled at, warned of punishment detail when they got back to barracks; it didn't help, their Immediate fear was too great.