Free Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds

casings ratcheting from the side, the torso of the big man - he had died instantly the moment the ghoul fired - turning into a pulverised red chaos. Meroka kept on firing until she had exhausted the magazine. The ghoul staggered back, his coat plastered with blood and tissue, at last relinquishing the human shield. He came to rest with his spine against the rear wall and produced a hideously exaggerated smile, as if invisible hooks were pulling up the extremities of his mouth.
    Behind the blue-grey lips was a compacted horror of black teeth and tongue, as if there was too much squeezed into too little space.
    ‘I am but one of many,’ the ghoul said, his voice like wind through trees, dry and spectral. ‘You are but one, Quillon.’
    The ghoul let go of his weapon.
    ‘Did you come alone?’ Meroka asked, dropping the magazine and reaching into her coat for a spare.
    ‘Of course I didn’t.’
    ‘Where are the others?’
    ‘All around you. There’s no point in running.’ The ghoul coughed black treacle out of his mouth. ‘There are too many of us, and now we know exactly where you are and exactly where you think you are going.’
    ‘But you probably don’t know about this,’ Quillon said, aiming the angel gun. He waited an instant for the ghoul’s eyes to alight on it, another instant for a flicker of recognition to show in his face.
    ‘That won’t work down—’
    Quillon fired. The gun twitched in his hand - it wasn’t so much recoil as a kind of quickening, the weapon stirring from sleep. Crimson light, bright enough to etch an after-image in his vision, lanced from the barrel. The beam boiled into the ghoul and turned half of him to black char in no more than a second. The smell hit Quillon an instant later.
    Along with the realisation that he had just killed for the third time.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The angel left a slick of black blood as they dragged it to the nearest outer door. Bits of it kept flaking off like charred newspaper. If there was anything useful on the corpse, some weapon or gadget that might help them, it was going to have to remain undiscovered.
    Meroka pulled open the window, then reached down to the door handle. She had to push it open against the force of the wind. The train was passing over a latticework bridge, spanning one of the points where some impossibly ancient cataclysm had chipped a crevasse in the black fabric of Spearpoint, ripping a tapering cleft all the way down to the next ledge. She shoved the dead ghoul and the body tumbled to the tracks, the train’s forward motion snatching it away. Quillon only just had time to see the angel slip through a gap in the rails and plummet into the dark void under the bridge. There would be precious little to recognise after it had hit the ground again, leagues below. He imagined the corpse providing some puzzle for a counterpart to himself, a striving young pathologist in Horsetown’s equivalent of the Third District Morgue.
    They were struggling with the other body when a partition door slid open further down the carriage and two of the rowdy businessmen peered cautiously out. So did the mother who had been sitting in the next compartment along. None of them said anything. They merely looked at Meroka and Quillon, at the remaining body and the tableau of carnage surrounding them.
    ‘As you were,’ Meroka said.
    All three moved quietly back into their compartments.
    ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t throw him overboard after all,’ Quillon said.
    ‘What do you care?’
    ‘He was an innocent man. If he falls all the way down to the next ledge, no one will ever know what happened to him. At least if we leave him on the train he’ll be found by someone.’
    ‘With your fingerprints all over him.’
    ‘The least of my worries, Meroka.’ There was no need to add that his fingerprints were purposefully nonspecific, making a unique match very hard to prove.
    They moved the dead man into the empty compartment and slid the door closed on him.