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A crip by the name of Easy Money ran the HoloWhores down at a place called Carnaby's Pit. At least he had been running them the last time Jonny Qabbala, drug dealer, ex-Committee for Public Health bounty hunter, and self-confessed loser, had paid him a visit. Jonny was hoping that Easy was still working the Pit. He had a present for him from a dead friend.

The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left an empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin had been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny to get his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord Conover) but over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had become, to Jonny, something close to a friend. And close to a friend was as much as Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was fear of loss more than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny at a distance from most of the other losers and one-percenters that crowded Los Angeles.

Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered, idly, if the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What would the extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of empty space, when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's head?

Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New Palestine soldier in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a Mishima Guardsman.

Jonny pushed his way through a group of Pemex-U. S. workers negotiating for rice wine at the weekend mercado that covered the street near Fountain Avenue. The air was thick with the scents of animal waste, sweat, roasting meat and hashish. Chickens beat their wings against wire cages while legless vat-grown sheep lay docilely in the butchers' stalls, waiting for their turn on their skewers. Old women in hipils motioned Jonny over, holding up bright bolts of cloth, bootleg computer chips and glittering butterfly knives. Jonny kept shaking his head. No, gracias…Ima ja naku…Nein…"

Handsome young Germans, six of them, all in the latest eel-skin cowboy boots and silk overalls (marked with the logo of some European movie studio) lugged portable holo-recorders between the stalls, making another in their endless series of World Link documentaries about the death of street culture. Those quickly-made documentaries and panel discussions about the Alpha Rats (who they were, their intentions, their burden on the economy of the West) seemed to make up the bulk of the Link's broadcasts these days.