We came down soiled and greasy - Hangdog, Boris and me, Cindy Thunderbird.The tourist jets missed this place. If it wasn't for the malfunction, acquired when we spun out in a power-zapped matrix of metal-alloys, we would have missed it, too.

Coated in slimeslick, our machine became adhesive. With the nosecone mashed in, and the high G-force seats all mangled, we were stuck here, amongst these back-street burn- outs.We were a long way from the Powerplay Ground, unable to nail the throttle to the floor and break through the Gravity-bug without copping whiplash to the max. The multiple-tube Netcage glowed a useless fire-engine red. We must have pulled a big burn-out when we came down, slicks smoking, oil all over.

Best thing for us to do was to activate the sleepers, set the twisters and wait for daylight. Then send out the Hi-Tack buzzbox to work on the blown rat-motor. We stooged around for a while, treading air, then fired the Tron-burner, to give us a few hours of metallic heat. The night was alive with giant cockroaches and mega-wetas, grunting street predators, whispering strip stormers .....

Dawn flares dirty pink. We are in one of the world's hottest NeoColonial trouble-spots, but we know better than to challenge the enemy visible on the monitors. They are just jammers, not part of the real action. With a life expectancy of seconds, their perverse attacks are little more than troublesome illusions.

A revenge-wreaker materialises. A one-man fighting force, armed with a pump-action shotgun, swarm jets and rocket launchers. He's got the latest Harpoon Gabriel rockets, water-cooled. He is riding a small missile-hovercraft, coated with shimmering grey diodes. Just before he disintegrates, we sense something calling to us. Something agile, fast and deadly - but the call sign has decayed completely, and we are unable to trace it.

The light turns a neutral grey. All around us in full daylight we see rusted space-hulks, corroded machine-hulls, roped together and abandoned. There is the odd flare-up of colour from them, which mimics the deep lustre of bright jungle orchids. These colours look utterly bizarre, flashing against the grey, grainy streets.

Hangdog is restless. The autobuzzbox will take most of the day to reconfigure the blinked- out data and develop new data. We've all got knotted-up muscles, feel as if we've been jogging up mountains for days. We need to stretch. Climbing out of the cockpit, its screens still vibrating ceaselessly with nuked visions, we're heading for the local Surge Zone, where we'll be able to mingle anonymously with the borderline trash-nomads.

Soon as we move away from the shield, a couple of burn-outs start towards us, in languid slow-motion. Their grating metallic voices harshly reprove us for not making ourselves accessible.Colour them gone, waste them, shut them down, was what we were thinking. Moving too fast for them, anyway. They were ghosting into the slipstream.

Straight up overhead were swirling clouds and SDI orbital debris, all of it pretty much disabled and tumbling. Oncoming pieces of untrackable junk colliding and spawning a debris belt of destruction that the thrusters and boosters of any removal satellite-haulers just have to make the best of. Sky-haunting, polychrome laser-tracers point to a future where humans seem to be about to omnicide off the planet.

Down here, where we are, because we're not robot-fed, we go looking for protein. We're gradually getting acclimatised to the rarified space and abandoned mine workings of the central city area of Akarana. The faces of the local people are like sandstone plates. Worn and blunted by natural attrition and the endless alienation, yet sometimes one catches a hint of intersecting planes of tense energy, when they see we're not oppressors.

The harbour volcanic vent's scorched and still faintly smouldering. The interlaced symbols of interlocked conglomerates have not been erased. The old neon signage still smoulders here and there. FLETCHALLCARHOLHARVQUORPGOOFIELDWATT. Dull black windows are embedded like glass rocks in the sides of skyscrapers. Cinders and ash fill the gutters. Doomsayers and naysayers shuffle up and down, preaching cargo cult economics. The faint whiff of chemical aromas, of spilled butane and scorched rubber, are everpresent.

We have reached the local underground market. It caters to expendable users who come here to make traumatic contact, to buy virus suppressors, to find an exploiter. Here you can see one virus feeding off another virus. A Fatburger can let drop his snack wrapper, put his eyes into boggle overdrive, release any kind of scratch acid and there's no offence taken. All-talking, all-moving, this place is at the centre of the hub.

It's a rusted-out subterranean sink, an excavated old pub site. In the flickering shadows of this former beer garden, the urgency of the urbanoids has taken on the intensity of a game of 3-dimensional blitz-chess. There are the usual acupuncturists, crystal gazers, harmonic convergence believers. Synthesised hippy gonks are here for the serendipity, for the synchronicity. Black-coded slam-dancers in protection suits and silver-starburst love-slaves let loose on their days off, make gunpoint sales here.

In the dark upper reaches of this capacious cavern, self-lacerating characters from the lower depths, victims of cash-rich drug giants, huddle by a pay-as-U-go HDTV, next to a service tunnel. These troglodytes obviously aren't licensed and are probably prepared to vanish into the underground labyrinth the moment they sense a Flogger patrol snaking round. They express a ghoulish fascination in us, staring hard. One or two even fashion a grotesque hello as we pass by.

The hyper-wreck bargain bins display personalised handbags, customised baseball caps, glinting titanium-tipped tungsten-steel blades, pen-sized bazookas, you name it. Early-model satellite receiving dishes are stacked by the knives and forks of antennae, corkscrew aerials, peeler transmitters, used backpack earth stations.

Off to one side, in a sterilised area, is the Med-Mart, where unregistered laboratory technicians and struck-off paramedics make their purchases, fossicking amongst holding tanks of cut-price surgical spare parts. Guerrillas, in camouflage fatigues and surgical gloves, boisterously hawk deformed sheets of artificial bio-tissue.These are permeable, as thin as layers of skin and kept in a chemical solution bath.

The pandemonium in this market recess is tremendous. The specialists accompany their examination of the merchandise with furtive hissing conversations in a kind of dog-Latin, the accepted argot, for this black market is famous far beyond its immediate location.

Intricate metal honeycombs from China, fabricated for implants, are placed out systematically on the crazed surfaces of worn ceramic benches. A crystalline lattice is growing from the dirty crystal grains in a high-sided translucent container, the long columns of polycrystals are like stained phototropic fingers, hooked over and reaching for the light.

In an over-lit grotto, pre-coded DNA, embedded in an amorphous web of polymer chains, is at a special reduced price. It glistens in its vat. A read-out proclaims that the helixes contain a complete language learning mechanism and a compatible encyclopaedic knowledge of the solar system. It can even be boosted by application of a silicon-chip intensive laminate.

Bart, who has wandered some distance away, suddenly sounds off with his high grunt factor. He has found what he's looking for - a rare make of tendon. An oxide-resistant fibrous protein collagen, it has been knitted out of a biological polymer embedded in a gel matrix of polypropylene membranes. Because it is creep-resistant, it will make a perfect replacement for his own damaged body-part, whose microtears have not gelled properly - months after an injury - forcing him to wear an ice-pod suspension boot.

He's haggling fiercely, his whip-like tongue undercutting the exorbitant sales pitch. In the tic of a twitchy muscle, he's wrapped his deal up.

At that moment a cry of agony and sucked-in pain, which erupts out of the dark space behind the blare of the digital telebanks, alerts us to the overhead presence of a Heli- Fortress belonging to the Puni-tech military-industrial complex. It's executing a low closed loop sequence, heat sensors probing with their sensitive depth perceptors for heat images of glowing Tronburners in denied areas. We realise that the time-lapse zone is coming round, we would be vulnerable. Memories of nukeflash galvanise us as we hurry away.

At its far end the market turns into a concrete jungle. Abandoned children queue listlessly in front of a Laserdrome for a chance to peek at what Aotearoa was like before the great upheavals. Through the entranceway we glimpse a lifesize hologram of sawtooth ravines, razorback spurs and tree-serrated skylines. The axis was revolving to show gorse gullies, rocky gulches and biscuit-coloured eroded clay crusts. The technology seems old- fashioned, the image out of focus.

Stopped at The Tacobender, picked up some enchiladas to go and kept moving. Past a vandalised, closed-down chapel devoted to good works. Past a clump of lurid phone booths. A broken-into clinic. A smashed aquarium. A meat bazaar called On The Hoof, in which trapped wild game and shackled farm animals lead a rattletrap existence, awaiting the guillotine.

Our enchiladas' seemingly subtle flavours are followed by a not-so-subtle petroleum aftertaste and the three of us are in a state of congealed bloody-mindedness as we climb from the paradisial pit of the marketplace onto Symonds Street. A sudden shimmer of noxious traffic fumes, reddish-blue sky, an ominous band of dark cloud standing off to sea. Sixteen wheel juggernauts bumper to bumper along the choked street.

But we didn't care about that. Something else had caught our attention over on the elevated plaza. We were looking at mutoids, old warriors, headphones clamped on, endorphins active, wallowing in the spray of industrial pollution, guffawing like the instigators of a crimewave.This was the Touchdown Plaza Restaurant. Here, in these invisible forcefields, below the freestyle anti-gravity aerobic performances, visible all over the public sightscreens, the elderly troopers had mustered.

What was once a rest and recreation resort up above the Waitemata Harbour was now the twilight arena for remnants of the Zed Zone fallout. Here they were, still war-gaming in this lost Pacific bolthole. We recognised many of the former heroes, dining out on their old war stories.

Chrysler-D Player and Super Huey, the two warp-spasmed shockway riders who at one time had been all over the screen, provoking disgust amongst concerned citizens with their atrocities. Seated with them, slavering Phobos, that lifer, had his head bowed before a fast- track baby computer, obviously rehearsing yet another put-down. The attention-getting squish of Leather Fist, still showing hand-eye co-ordination mismatch, fumble fingers revealing soft, raw pulp, exposed and quivering. He seemed to be periodically going off into uncontrolled twitching. Leather Fist was one of the failures of the grand psychological build- down scenario, which was popularly supposed to have created reconstituted, re- authenticated personalities, able to hold their own in decent, civilised society.

Chiller, Rattler and Latex Crash, who had been psychotropic soldiers up in the Hunua Ranges, where they were said to thrillkill at will, sat here now, at their restaurant table, like mutant waste-products, golden-boy trash, outlined against the olive-green pixels of a sight- screen and making shambolic movements, their mighty molars spasmodically grinding up and spitting out not only kumara skin fibres, but also what were once top secret details about the outbreak of Showdown missile launchers in Micronesia.

And sitting here too, was Hacker, Shadowland's troubleshooter in the old days. He had been the throw-weight. He had put a ring around the red button and with a single keyboard halted Threat Azimuth on its move towards Absolute Nil.

On the run-up to a surgical first-strike rehearsal he had negotiated a ceiling of nuclear warheads, which had been accepted by all the exponential demographies of the day. Unfortunately, following his dazzling success, Hacker had entered post-trauma neurosis, where he entertained presidential fantasies, as his latent messianic tendencies emerged. He had seen Aotearoa as the last bastion of the post-holocaust millennium. This illusion had been rudely shattered by a single surface burst and immediately afterwards Hacker had disappeared from public view.

He sat now in the apocalyptic city, several decades on. His teeth were winking white as ever but he'd obviously had a few lifts and tucks. Around him, a group of willing listeners. His mellifluous monologue was just as sparkling, and he was speaking, as usual, of his vision splendid, of that vanished world of pristine beaches, perfect valley parabolas and birds turning in a tight arc towards the wonderful concave skimmers on the water - hovercraft, UFO's. It was the same speech we'd first heard years before at our neo-natal institute, when we were still in our cradles. Today he seemed to speak from beyond the grave.

Abruptly, Hangdog, who had been scanning the sky, indicated his flexible fleshtone Glo- Tron arm panel. All the green alphanumerics were beginning to converge at zero. We had to get back to our transport. Figuring out stratosphere-speeds in our heads we turned and slipped away.