“Got no dope or vouchers,” I say to them, much more calmly than I feel. “Just going down to the station with my mother. Want to let us pass?”
“The fuck are you doing, coming down here in that?” one of them says, and points to my uniform jacket. He’s a lean kid—all of them are—and his teeth are in bad shape even for a PRC resident.
“Don’t have any other clothes right now,” I tell him. I’m trying to gauge the right moment to go from appeasement to sudden violence as he steps closer. He’s half a head shorter than I am, but he has four of his friends behind him. I’ve been killing SRA marines and Lankies for five years now, but out here, in my going-out dress blues and without any weapons, I’m vulnerable. I find that I don’t like the feeling of powerlessness at all.
“What’s in the bag?” he asks my mom. She takes it off her shoulder with a resigned expression, as if she has gone through this particular routine many times.
“Nothing you want,” she says. She hands it to him, and he takes it as casually as if he’s helping her out with her groceries. His four friends have fanned out in a semicircle around us. I don’t see any weapons yet, and I resolve to deck the first of these kids who produces one.
The kid with the bad teeth opens Mom’s bag and pulls out a rolled-up rain cloak. He drops it on the ground, rummages around in the bag, and makes a disappointed noise when nothing in there is to his liking.
“Hey,” I say, anger welling up inside me. He looks up at me. There’s neither concern nor curiosity in that gaze, just boredom and dull hostility.
“You may want to pick that up and hand it back,” I say.
“Oh?” He looks at his friends and smiles thinly. The way they are standing, I can probably take down two or three of them if they don’t pull out any weapons.
“Let’s say I really don’t wanna,” he says. Then he lifts the bottom of his ratty shirt and flashes the taped-up handle of what looks like a homemade pistol.
“Don’t,” Mom says behind me. “Just don’t.”
There’s a popping sound, and the kid with the bad teeth jerks convulsively. Then he drops to the ground. Behind him, on the sidewalk by the mouth of the alley, stand three cops in full riot gear. One of them has his stun stick aimed over his forearm. The other four hoodlum apprentices turn around. Two of them freeze in place. The other two take off down the alley like panicked rabbits.
“Dumbasses,” one of the cops says, and takes off after them, barreling past us in his riot armor like a fleet frigate at full speed. The other two cops walk into the alley, stun sticks aimed at the hood rats who just tried to rob us. In front of me, the kid who took Mom’s bag lies twitching, the electrical probes from the cop’s stun stick right between his shoulder blades.
“Oh, look,” the cop says. “Gun.”
The homemade pistol has slipped out of the kid’s waistband and onto the dirty asphalt. In a very casual motion, the other cop aims his stun stick as well, and shoots another pair of probes into the back of the prone hood rat, who convulses again.
“Look, he’s down already,” Mom says.
“He’s lucky I didn’t shoot him in the back of the head,” the cop says. Their appearance has saved us from a mugging or worse, but for some reason I feel more of a threat from their casual use of force than I did from the blustering of the hood rats.
The cop stoops down and picks up Mom’s bag. Then he hands it to her.
“Thank you,” she says.
He turns to the other two kids, who are standing very still with their arms raised and their hands on their heads.
“That guy’s in the fleet,” the cop says, and nods in my direction. “He keeps those giant ugly aliens from coming here and gassing us all to death. He’s worth a hundred of you shit-eating wastes of calories.”
They don’t respond, just stare ahead, as if they don’t want to give the cop the slightest excuse to use that stun stick on them. They’re shitheads, but not terribly dangerous. The cops standing around us, on the other hand, radiate danger.
“Now get out of here,” the first cop says to me. He raises the visor of his riot helmet, and I see that he’s the sergeant I talked to earlier, back in the transit station. “Told you nothing good ever happens here after sunset. You’re lucky we spotted you.”
“Thanks,” I say, but I’m not sure that I mean it.
“Let’s go,” Mom says, and we walk out of the alley quickly, as much to leave the cops behind as the kids who just tried to casually mug us.