Woken Furies

ONE

Damage.

The wound stung like fuck, but it wasn’t as bad as some I’d had. The blaster bolt came in blind across my ribs, already weakened by the door plating it had to chew through to get to me. Priests, up against the slammed door and looking for a quick gut-shot. Fucking amateur night.

They’d probably caught almost as much pain themselves from the pointblank blowback off the plating. Behind the door, I was already twisting aside. What was left of the charge ploughed a long, shallow gash across my ribcage and went out, smouldering in the folds of my coat. Sudden ice down that side of my body and the abrupt stench of fried skin-sensor components. That curious bone-splinter fizzing that’s almost a taste, where the bolt had ripped through the biolube casing on the floating ribs.

Eighteen minutes later, by the softly glowing display chipped into my upper left field of vision, the same fizzing was still with me as I hurried down the lamp-lit street, trying to ignore the wound. Stealthy seep of fluids beneath my coat. Not much blood. Sleeving synthetic has its advantages.

“Looking for a good time, sam?”

“Already had one,” I told him, veering away from the doorway. He blinked wave-tattooed eyelids in a dismissive flutter that said your loss and leaned his tightly-muscled frame languidly back into the gloom. I crossed the street and took the corner, tacking between a couple more whores, one a woman, the other of indeterminate gender. The woman was an augment, forked dragon tongue flickering out around her overly prehensile lips, maybe tasting my wound on the night air. Her eyes danced a similar passage over me, then slid away. On the other side, the cross-gender pro shifted its stance slightly and gave me a quizzical look but said nothing.

Neither were interested. The streets were rain-slick and deserted, and they’d had longer to see me coming than the doorway operator. I’d cleaned up since leaving the citadel, but something about me must have telegraphed the lack of business opportunity.

At my back, I heard them talking about me in Stripjap. I heard the word for broke.

They could afford to be choosy. In the wake of the Mecsek Initiative, business was booming. Tekitomura was packed that winter, thronging with salvage brokers and the deCom crews that drew them the way a trawler wake draws ripwings. Making New Hok safe for a New Century, the ads went. From the newly built hoverloader dock down at the Kompcho end of town it was less than a thousand kilometres, straight line distance, to the shores of New Hokkaido, and the loaders were running day and night. Outside of an airdrop, there is no faster way to get across the Andrassy Sea. And on Harlan’s World, you don’t go up in the air if you can possibly avoid it. Any crew toting heavy equipment—and they all were—was going to New Hok on a hoverloader out of Tekitomura. Those that lived would be coming back the same way.

Boom town. Bright new hope and brawling enthusiasm as the Mecsek money poured in. I limped down thoroughfares littered with the detritus of spent human merriment. In my pocket, the freshly excised cortical stacks clicked together like dice.

There was a fight going on at the intersection of Pencheva Street and Muko Prospect. The pipe houses on Muko had just turned out and their synapse-fried patrons had met late-shift dock workers coming up through the decayed quiet of the warehouse quarter. More than enough reason for violence. Now a dozen badly co-ordinated figures stumbled back and forth in the street, flailing and clawing inexpertly at each other while a gathered crowd shouted encouragement. One body already lay inert on the fused glass paving, and someone else was dragging their body, a limb’s length at a time, out of the fray, bleeding. Blue sparks shorted off a set of overcharged power knuckles, elsewhere light glimmered on a blade. But everyone still standing seemed to be having a good time and there were no police as yet.

Yeah, part of me jeered. Probably all too busy up the hill right now.

I skirted the action as best I could, shielding my injured side. Beneath the coat, my hands closed on the smooth curve of the last hallucinogen grenade and the slightly sticky hilt of the Tebbit knife.

Never get into a fight if you can kill quickly and be gone.

Virginia Vidaura—Envoy Corps trainer, later career criminal and sometime political activist. Something of a role model for me, though it was several decades since I’d last seen her. On a dozen different worlds, she crept into my mind unbidden, and I owed that ghost in my head my own life a dozen times over. This time I didn’t need her or the knife. I got past the fight without eye contact, made the corner of Pencheva and melted into the shadows that lay across the alley mouths on the seaward side of the street. The timechip in my eye said I was late.

Pick it up, Kovacs. According to my contact in Millsport, Plex wasn’t all that reliable at the best of times, and I hadn’t paid him enough to wait long.

Five hundred metres down and then left into the tight fractal whorls of Belacotton Kohei Section, named centuries ago for the habitual content and the original owner/operator family whose warehouse frontages walled the curving maze of alleys. With the Unsettlement and the subsequent loss of New Hokkaido as any kind of market, the local belaweed trade pretty much collapsed and families like Kohei went rapidly bankrupt. Now the grime-filmed upper-level windows of their façades peered sadly across at each other over gape-mouthed loading bay entrances whose shutters were all jammed somewhere uncommitted between open and closed.

There was talk of regeneration of course, of reopening units like these and retooling them as deCom labs, training centres and hardware storage facilities.

Mostly, it was still just talk—the enthusiasm had kindled on the wharf line units facing the hoverloader ramps further west, but so far it hadn’t spread further in any direction than you could trust a wirehead with your phone. This far off the wharf and this far east, the chitter of Mecsek finance was still pretty inaudible.

The joys of trickledown.

Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six showed a faint glow in one upper window and the long restless tongues of shadows in the light that seeped from under the half cranked loading-bay shutter gave the building the look of a one-eyed, drooling maniac. I slid to the wall and dialled up the synthetic sleeve’s auditory circuits for what they were worth, which wasn’t much. Voices leaked out into the street, fitful as the shadows at my feet.

“—telling you, I’m not going to hang around for that.”

It was a Millsport accent, the drawling metropolitan twang of Harlan’s World Amanglic dragged up to an irritated jag. Plex’s voice, muttering below sense-making range, made soft provincial counterpoint. He seemed to be asking a question.

“How the fuck would I know that? Believe what you want.” Plex’s companion was moving about, handling things. His voice faded back in the echoes of the loading bay. I caught the words kaikyo, matter, a chopped laugh. Then again, coming closer to the shutter “—matters is what the family believes, and they’ll believe what the technology tells them. Technology leaves a trail, my friend.” A sharp coughing and indrawn breath that sounded like recreational chemicals going down. “This guy is fucking late.”

I frowned. Kaikyo has a lot of meanings, but they all depend on how old you are. Geographically, it’s a strait or a channel. That’s early Settlement Years use, or just hyper-educated, kanji-scribbling, First Families pretension.

This guy didn’t sound First Family, but there was no reason he couldn’t have been around back when Konrad Harlan and his well connected pals were turning Glimmer VI into their own personal backyard.

Plenty of old personalities still on stack from that far back, just waiting to be downloaded into a working sleeve. Come to that, you wouldn’t need to re-sleeve more than a half dozen times, end to end, to live through the whole of Harlan’s World’s human history anyway. It’s still not much over four centuries, earth standard, since the colony barges made planetfall.

Envoy intuition twisted about in my head. It felt wrong. I’d met men and women with centuries of continuous life behind them and they didn’t talk like this guy. This wasn’t the wisdom of ages, drawling out into the Tekitomura night over pipe fumes.

On the street, scavenged into the argot of Stripjap a couple of hundred years later, kaikyo means a contact who can shift stolen goods. A covert flow manager. In some parts of the Millsport Archipelago, it’s still common usage. Elsewhere, the meaning is shifting to describe aboveboard financial consultants.

Yeah, and further south it means a holy man possessed by spirits, or a sewage outlet. Enough of this detective shit. You heard the man—you’re late.

I got the heel of one hand under the edge of the shutter and hauled upward, locking up the tidal rip of pain from my wound as well as the synthetic sleeve’s nervous system would let me. The shutter ratcheted noisily to the roof. Light fell out into the street and all over me.

“Evening.”

“Jesus!” The Millsport accent jerked back a full step. He’d only been a couple of metres away from the shutter when it went up.

“Tak.”

“Hello Plex.” My eyes stayed on the newcomer. “Who’s the tan?”

By then I already knew. Pale, tailored good looks straight out of some low-end experia flic, somewhere between Micky Nozawa and Ryu Bartok.

Well-proportioned fighter’s sleeve, bulk in the shoulders and chest, length in the limbs. Stacked hair, the way they’re doing it on the bioware catwalks these days, that upward static-twisted thing that’s meant to look like they just pulled the sleeve out of a clone tank. A suit bagged and draped to suggest hidden weaponry, a stance that said he had none he was ready to use. Combat arts crouch that was more bark than readiness to bite. He still had the discharged micro-pipe in one curled palm, and his pupils were spiked wide open. Concession to an ancient tradition put illuminum tattooed curlicues across one corner of his forehead.

Millsport yakuza apprentice. Street thug.

“You don’t call me tani,” he hissed. “You are the outsider here, Kovacs. You are the intruder.”

I left him at the periphery of my vision and looked towards Plex, who was over by the workbenches, fiddling with a knot of webbing straps and trying on a smile that didn’t want to be on his dissipated aristo face.

“Look, Tak—”

“This was strictly a private party, Plex. I didn’t ask you to subcontract the entertainment.”

The yakuza twitched forward, barely restrained. He made a grating noise deep in his throat. Plex looked panicked.

“Wait, I…” He put down the webbing with an obvious effort. “Tak, he’s here about something else.”

“He’s here on my time,” I said mildly.

“Listen, Kovacs. You fucking—”

“No.” I looked back at him as I said it, hoping he could read the bright energy in my tone for what it was. “You know who I am, you’ll stay out of my way. I’m here to see Plex, not you. Now get out.”

I don’t know what stopped him, Envoy rep, late-breaking news from the citadel—because they’ll be all over it by now, you made such a fucking mess up there—or just a cooler head than the cheap-suited punk persona suggested.

He stood braced in the door of his own rage for a moment, then stood down and displaced it, all poured into a glance at the nails of his right hand and a grin.

“Sure. You just go ahead and transact with Plex here. I’ll wait outside. Shouldn’t take long.”

He even took the first step towards the street. I looked back at Plex.

“What the fuck’s he talking about?”

Plex winced.

“We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak. We can’t—”

“Oh no,” But looking around the room I could already see the swirled patterns in the dust where someone had been using a grav-lifter. “No, no, you told me—”

“I-I know, Tak, but—”

“I paid you.”

“I’ll give you the money—”

“I don’t want the fucking money, Plex.” I stared at him, fighting down the urge to rip his throat out. Without Plex, there was no upload. Without the upload—“I want my fucking body back!”

“It’s cool, it’s cool. You’ll get it back. It’s just right now—”

“It’s just right now, Kovacs, we’re using the facilities.” The yakuza drifted back into my line of sight, still grinning. “Because to tell the truth, they were pretty much ours in the first place. But then Plex here probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”

I shuttled a glance between them. Plex looked embarrassed.

You gotta feel sorry for the guy. Isa, my Millsport contact broker, all of fifteen years old, razored violet hair and brutally obvious archaic datarat plugs, working on world-weary reflective while she laid out the deal and the cost. Look at history, man. It fucked him over but good.

History, it was true, didn’t seem to have done Plex any favours. Born three centuries sooner with the name Kohei, he’d have been a spoilt stupid younger son with no particular need to do more than exercise his obvious intelligence in some gentleman’s pursuit like astrophysics or archaeologue science. As it was, the Kohei family had left its post-Unsettlement generations nothing but the keys to ten streets of empty warehouses and a decayed aristo charm that, in Plex’s own self-deprecating words, made it easier than you’d think to get laid when broke. Pipe-blasted, he told me the whole shabby story on less than three days’ acquaintance. He seemed to need to tell someone, and Envoys are good listeners. You listen, you file under local colour, you soak it up. Later, the recalled detail maybe saves your life.

Driven by the terror of a single lifespan and no re-sleeve, Plex’s newly impoverished ancestors learnt to work for a living, but most of them weren’t very good at it. Debt piled up, the vultures moved in. By the time Plex came along, his family were in so deep with the yakuza that low-grade criminality was just a fact of life. He’d probably grown up around aggressively slouched suits like this one. Probably learnt that embarrassed, giveup-the-ground smile at his father’s knee.

The last thing he wanted to do was upset his patrons.

The last thing I wanted to do was ride a hoverloader back to Millsport in this sleeve.

“Plex, I’m booked out of here on the Saffron Queen. That’s four hours away. Going to refund me my ticket?”

“We’ll flicker it, Tak.” His voice was pleading. “There’s another ‘loader out to EmPee tomorrow evening. I’ve got stuff, I mean Yukio’s guys—”

“—use my fucking name, man,” yelped the yakuza.

“They can flicker you to the evening ride, no one’s ever going to know.” The pleading gaze turned on Yukio. “Right? You’ll do that, right?”

I added a stare of my own. “Right? Seeing as how you’re fucking up my exit plans currently?”

“You already fucked up your exit, Kovacs.” The yakuza was frowning, head-shaking. Playing at sempai with mannerisms and a clip-on solemnity he’d probably copied directly from his own sempai not too far back in his apprenticeship. “Do you know how much heat you’ve got out there looking for you right now? The cops have put in sniffer squads all over uptown, and my guess is they’ll be all over the ‘loader dock inside an hour. The whole TPD is out to play. Not to mention our bearded stormtrooper friends from the citadel. Fuck, man, you think you could have left a little more blood up there.”

“I asked you a question. I didn’t ask for a critique. You going to flicker me to the next departure or not?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved it away. “Consider it fucking done. What you don’t appreciate, Kovacs, is that some people have got serious business to transact. You come up here and stir up local law enforcement with your mindless violence, they’re liable to get all enthusiastic and go busting people we need.”

“Need for what?”

“None of your fucking business.” The sempai impression skidded off and he was pure Millsport street again. “You just keep your fucking head down for the next five or six hours and try not to kill anyone else.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll call you.”

I shook my head. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Better than.” His voice climbed. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Kovacs?”

I measured the distance, the time it would take me to get to him. The pain it would cost. I ladled out the words that would push him. “Who am I talking to? I’m talking to a whiff-wired chimpira, a fucking street punk up here from Millsport and off the leash from his sempai, and it’s getting old, Yukio. Give me your fucking phone—I want to talk to someone with authority.”

The rage detonated. Eyes flaring wide, hand reaching for whatever he had inside the suit jacket. Way too late.

I hit him.

Across the space between us, unfolding attacks from my uninjured side.

Sideways into throat and knee. He went down choking. I grabbed an arm, twisted it and laid the Tebbit knife across his palm, held so he could see.

“That’s a bioware blade,” I told him tightly. “Adoracion Haemorrhagic Fever. I cut you with this and every blood vessel in your body ruptures inside three minutes. Is that what you want?”

He heaved against my grip, whooped after breath. I pressed down with the blade, and saw the panic in his eyes.

“It isn’t a good way to die, Yukio. Phone.”

He pawed at his jacket and the phone tipped out, skittered on the evercrete. I leaned close enough to be sure it wasn’t a weapon, then toed it back towards his free hand. He fumbled it up, breath still coming in hoarse jags through his rapidly bruising throat.

“Good. Now punch up someone who can help, then give it to me.”

He thumbed the display a couple of times and offered the phone to me, face pleading the way Plex’s had a couple of minutes earlier. I fixed him with my eyes for a long moment, trading on the notorious immobility of cheap synth features, then let go of his locked-out arm, took the phone and stepped back out of reach. He rolled over away from me, still clutching his throat. I put the phone to my ear.

“Who is this?” asked an urbane male voice in Japanese.

“My name is Kovacs.” I followed the language shift automatically. “Your chimpira Yukio and I are having a conflict of interest that I thought you might like to resolve.”

A frigid silence.

“That’s some time tonight I’d like you to resolve it,” I said gently.

There was a hiss of indrawn breath at the other end of the line. “Kovacs-san, you are making a mistake.”

“Really?”

“It would be unwise to involve us in your affairs.”

“I’m not the one doing the involving. Currently I’m standing in a warehouse looking at an empty space where some equipment of mine used to be. I have it on pretty good authority the reason it’s gone is that you took it.”

More silence. Conversations with the yakuza are invariably punctuated with long pauses, during which you’re supposed to reflect and listen carefully to what’s not being said.

I wasn’t in the mood for it. My wound ached.

“I’m told you’ll be finished in about six hours. I can live with that. But I want your word that at the end of that time the equipment will be back here and in working order, ready for me to use. I want your word.”

“Hirayasu Yukio is the person to—”

“Yukio is a chimp. Let us deal honestly with each other in this. Yukio’s only job here is to make sure I don’t slaughter our mutual service provider. Which, incidentally, is something he’s not doing well. I was already short on patience when I arrived, and I don’t expect to replenish my stock any time soon. I’m not interested in Yukio. I want your word.”

“And if I do not give it?”

“Then a couple of your front offices are going to end up looking like the inside of the citadel tonight. You can have my word on that.”

Quiet. Then: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.”

“Oh please. What are you, making speeches? I thought I was dealing at executive level. Am I going to have to do some damage here?”

Another kind of silence. The voice on the other end of the line seemed to have thought of something else.

“Is Hirayasu Yukio harmed?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” I looked down coldly at the yakuza. He’d mastered breathing again and was beginning to sit up. Beads of sweat gleamed at the borders of his tattoo. “But all that can change. It’s in your hands.”

“Very well.” Barely a handful of seconds before the response. By yakuza standards, it was unseemly haste. “My name is Tanaseda. You have my word, Kovacs-san, that the equipment you require will be in place and available to you at the time you specify. In addition, you will be paid for your trouble.”

“Thank you. That—”

“I have not finished. You further have my word that if you commit any acts of violence against my personnel, I shall issue a global writ for your capture and subsequent execution. I am talking about a very unpleasant real death. Is that understood?”

“It seems fair. But I think you’d better tell the chimp to behave himself. He seems to have delusions of competence.”

“Let me speak to him.”

Yukio Hirayasu was sitting by now, hunched over on the evercrete, wheezing breathily. I hissed at him and tossed him the phone. He caught it awkwardly, one-handed, still massaging his throat with the other.

“Your sempai wants a word.”

He glared up at me out of tear-smeared, hating eyes, but he put the phone to his ear. Compressed Japanese syllables trickled out of it, like someone riffing on a ruptured gas cylinder. He stiffened and his head lowered. His answers ran bitten off and monosyllabic. The word yes featured a lot. One thing you’ve got to hand to the yakuza—they do discipline in the ranks like no one else.

The one-sided conversation ended and Yukio held the phone out to me, not meeting my eye. I took it.

“This matter is resolved,” said Tanaseda in my ear. “Please arrange to be elsewhere for the remainder of the night. You may return six hours from now when the equipment and your compensation will both be waiting for you. We will not speak again. This. Confusion. Has been most regrettable.”

He didn’t sound that upset.

“You recommend a good place for breakfast?” I asked.

Silence. A polite static backdrop. I weighed the phone in my palm for a moment, then tossed it back to Yukio.

“So.” I looked from the yakuza to Plex and back. “Either of you recommend a good place for breakfast?”

TWO

Before Leonid Mecsek unleashed his beneficence on the struggling economies of the Saffron Archipelago, Tekitomura scraped a seasonal living out of big game bottleback charters for rich sportsmen across from Millsport or the Ohrid Isles, and the harvest of webjellies for their internal oils.

Bioluminescence made these latter easiest to catch at night, but the sweeper crews that did it tended not to stay out for more than a couple of hours at a time. Longer and the webjellies’ gossamer fine stinging aerials got plastered so thick over clothing and onboard surfaces that you could lose serious productivity to toxin inhalation and skin burns. All night long, the sweepers came in so that crew and decks could be hosed clean with cheap biosolvent. Behind the Angier lamp-glare of the hosing station, a short parade of bars and eating houses stayed open until dawn.

Plex, spilling apologies like a leaky bucket, walked me down through the warehouse district to the wharf and into an unwindowed place called Tokyo Crow. It wasn’t very different from a low-end Millsport skipper’s bar mural sketches of Ebisu and Elmo on the stained walls, interspersed with the standard votive plaques inscribed in Kanji or Amanglic Roman: calm seas, please, and full nets. Monitors up behind the mirrorwood bar, giving out local weather coverage, orbital behaviour patterns and global breaking news. The inevitable holoporn on a broad projection base at the end of the room. Sweeper crew members lined the bar and knotted around the tables, faces blurred weary. It was a thin crowd, mostly male, mostly unhappy.

“I’ll get these,” said Plex hurriedly, as we entered.

“Too fucking right, you will.”

He gave me a sheepish look. “Um. Yeah. What do you want, then?”

“Whatever passes for whisky around here. Cask strength. Something I’ll be able to taste through the flavour circuits in this fucking sleeve.”

He sloped off to the bar and I found a corner table out of habit. Views to the door and across the clientele. I lowered myself into a seat, wincing at the movement in my blaster-raked ribs.

What a fucking mess.

Not really. I touched the stacks through the fabric of my coat pocket. I got what I came for.

Any special reason you couldn’t just cut their throats while they slept?

They needed to know. They needed to see it coming.

Plex came back from the bar, bearing glasses and a tray of tired-looking sushi. He seemed unaccountably pleased with himself.

“Look, Tak. You don’t need to worry about those sniffer squads. In a synth sleeve—”

I looked at him. “Yes. I know.”

“And, well, you know. It’s only six hours.”

“And all of tomorrow until the ‘loader ships out.” I hooked my glass. “I really think you’d better just shut up, Plex.”

He did. After a couple of brooding minutes, I discovered I didn’t want that either. I was jumpy in my synthetic skin, twitching like a meth comedown, uncomfortable with who I physically was. I needed distraction.

“You know Yukio long?”

He looked up, sulkily. “I thought you wanted—”

“Yeah. Sorry. I got shot tonight, and it hasn’t put me in a great mood. I was just—”

“You were shot?”

“Plex.” I leaned intently across the table. “Do you want to keep your fucking voice down.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I mean.” I gestured helplessly. “How the fuck do you stay in business, man? You’re supposed to be a criminal, for Christ’s sake.”

“It wasn’t my choice,” he said stiffly.

“No? How’s that work, then? They got some kind of conscription for it up here?”

“Very funny. I suppose you chose the military, did you? At seventeen fucking standard years old?”

I shrugged. “I made a choice, yeah. Military or the gangs. I put on a uniform. It paid better than the criminal stuff I was already doing.”

“Well, I was never in a gang.” He knocked back a chunk of his drink.

“The yakuza made sure of that. Too much danger of corrupting their investment. I went to the right tutors, spent time in the right social circles, learnt to walk the walk, talk the talk, and then they plucked me like a fucking cherry.”

His gaze beached on the scarred wood of the table top.

“I remember my father,” he said bitterly. “The day I got access to the family datastacks. Right after my coming-of-age party, the next morning. I was still hungover, still fried and Tanaseda and Kadar and Hirayasu in his office like fucking vampires. He cried that day.”

“That Hirayasu?”

He shook his head. “That’s the son. Yukio. You want to know how long I’ve known Yukio? We grew up together. Fell asleep together in the same Kanji classes, got wrecked on the same take, dated the same girls. He left for Millsport about the time I started my dh/biotech practicals, came back a year later wearing that fucking stupid suit.” He looked up. “You think I like living out my father’s debts?”

It didn’t seem to need an answer. And I didn’t want to listen to any more of this stuff. I sipped some more of the cask-strength whisky, wondering what the bite would be like in a sleeve with real taste buds. I gestured with the glass. “So how come they needed your de-and-re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting-set in town, surely.”

He shrugged. “Some-kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.”

“Organised crime, huh.”

There was a resentful envy in the way he stared at me. “You don’t have any family, do you?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” That was a little harsh, but he didn’t need to know the close truth. Feed him something else. “I’ve been away.”

“In the store?”

I shook my head. “Offworld.”

“Offworld? Where’d you go?” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, barely held back by the ghost of breeding. The Glimmer system has no habitable planets apart from Harlan’s World. Tentative terraforming down the plane of the ecliptic on Glimmer V won’t yield useful results for another century. Offworld for a Harlanite means a stellar-range needle cast, shrugging off your physical self and re-sleeving somewhere light years distant under an alien sun. It’s all very romantic and in the public consciousness known needlecast riders are accorded a celebrity status somewhat akin to pilots back on earth during the days of intra-system spaceflight.

The fact that, unlike pilots, these latter-day celebrities don’t actually have to do anything to travel the hypercaster, the fact that in many cases they have no actual skills or stature other than their hypercast fame itself, doesn’t seem to impede their triumphant conquest of the public imagination.

Old Earth is the real jackpot destination, of course, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go, so long as you come back. It’s a favourite boost technique for fading experia stars and out-of-favour Millsport courtesans. If you can just somehow scrape up the cost of the ‘cast, you’re more or less guaranteed years of well-paid coverage in the skullwalk magazines.

That, of course, doesn’t apply to Envoys. We just used to go silently, crush the odd planetary uprising, topple the odd regime, and then plug in something UN-compliant that worked. Slaughter and suppression across the stars, for the greater good—naturally—of a unified Protectorate.

I don’t do that any more.

“Did you go to Earth?”

“Among other places.” I smiled at a memory that was getting on for a century out of date. “Earth’s a shit-hole, Plex. Static fucking society, hyper-rich immortal overclass, cowed masses.”

He shrugged and poked morosely at the sushi with his chopsticks.

“Sounds just like this place.”

“Yeah.” I sipped some more whisky. There were a lot of subtle differences between Harlan’s World and what I’d seen on Earth, but I couldn’t be bothered to lay them out right now. “Now you come to mention it.”

“So what are you. Oh, fuck!”

For a moment I thought he was just fumbling the bottleback sushi.

Shaky feedback on the holed synth sleeve, or maybe just shaky close-to dawn weariness on me. It took me whole seconds to look up, track his gaze to the bar and the door, make sense of what was there.

The woman seemed unremarkable at first glance—slim and competent looking, in grey coveralls and a nondescript padded jacket, unexpectedly long hair, face pale to washed-out. A little too sharp-edged for sweeper crew, maybe. Then you noticed the way she stood, booted feet set slightly apart, hands pressed flat to the mirrorwood bar, face tipped forward, body preternaturally immobile. Then your eyes went back to that hair and—

Framed in the doorway not five metres off her flank, a group of senior caste New Revelation priests stood frigidly surveying the clientele. They must have spotted the woman about the same time I spotted them.

“Oh, shit fuck!”

“Plex, shut up.” I murmured it through closed teeth and stilled lips. “They don’t know my face.”

“But she’s—”

“Just. Wait.”

The spiritual well-being gang advanced into the room. Nine of them, all told. Cartoon patriarch beards and close shaven skulls, grim-faced and intent. Three officiators, the colours of the evangelical elect draped blackly across their dull ochre robes and the bioware scopes worn like an ancient pirate patch across one eye. They were locked in on the woman at the bar, bending her way like gulls on a downdraft. Across the room, her uncovered hair must have been a beacon of provocation.

Whether they were out combing the streets for me was immaterial. I’d gone masked into the citadel, synth-sleeved. I had no signature.

But rampant across the Saffron Archipelago, dripping down onto the northern reaches of the next landmass like venom from a ruptured web jelly and now, they told me, taking root in odd little pockets as far south as Millsport itself, the Knights of the New Revelation brandished their freshly regenerated gynophobia with an enthusiasm of which their Earthbound Islamo-Christian ancestors would have been proud. A woman alone in a bar was bad enough, a woman uncovered far worse, but this—

“Plex,” I said quietly. “On second thoughts, I think you’d maybe better get out of here.”

“Tak, listen—”

I dialled the hallucinogen grenade up to maximum delay, fused it and let it roll gently away under the table. Plex heard it go and he made a tiny yelping noise.

“Go on,” I said.

The lead officiator reached the bar. He stood half a metre away from the woman, maybe waiting for her to cringe.

She ignored him. Ignored, for that matter, everything further off than the bar surface under her hands and, it dawned on me, the face she could see reflected there.

I eased unhurriedly to my feet.

“Tak, it isn’t worth it, man. You don’t know wha—”

“I said go, Plex.” Drifting into it now, into the gathering fury like an abandoned skiff on the edge of the maelstrom. “You don’t want to play this screen.”

The officiator got tired of being ignored.

“Woman,” he barked. “You will cover yourself.”

“Why,” she enunciated back with bitten clarity, “don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.”

There was an almost comical pause. The nearest barflies jerked around on a collective look that gaped did she really say—

Somewhere, someone guffawed.

The blow was already swinging in. A gnarled, loose-fingered backhander that by rights should have catapulted the woman off the bar and onto the floor in a little heap. Instead—

The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funnelling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.

A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.

Mistake.

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.

I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Sarah.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.

Sarah—

“It’s him!”

Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.

“It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!”

With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.

Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean—Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.

Best to play it safe.

The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.

Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-grenade. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere

I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar.

Her face looked bruised.

I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.

“Can you stand?”

A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.

“Out. Try not to breathe.”

Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando.

Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.

“A light,” he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.”

He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.

“The angel.”

I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”

“The an—” And then something must have got through the hallucinogens.

His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.

I slashed his face open and left.

Deep enough.

Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.

The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.

Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.

The paving …

Move. Breathe. Get out of here.

A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid towards me, jewelled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss/clank of autograpples firing home into their shore side sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.

Get a grip, Tak. It’s just the chemicals.

Across the wharf, under a stilled robot crane, stray light glinted off her hair as she turned. I checked once more over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but the entrance to the bar was firmly closed. Faint noises leaked through at the lower limits of my cheap synth hearing. Could have been laughter, weeping, pretty much anything. H-grenades are harmless enough long-term, but while they last you do tend to lose interest in rational thought or action. I doubted anyone’d work out where the door was for the next half hour, let alone how to get through it.

The sweeper bumped up to the wharf, cranked tight by the autograpple cables. Figures leapt ashore, trading banter. I crossed unnoticed to the shadow of the crane. Her face floated ghost-like in the gloom. Pale, wolfish beauty. The hair that framed it seemed to crackle with half-seen energies.

“Pretty handy with that knife.”

I shrugged. “Practice.”

She looked me over. “Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well, you sure—” Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. “Shit, they got you.”

I shook my head. “Different party. Happened a while back.”

“Yeah? Looks to me like you could use a medic. I’ve got some friends could—”

“It isn’t worth it. I’m getting out of this in a couple of hours.”

Brows cranked. “Re-sleeve? Well, okay, you got better friends than mine. Making it pretty hard for me to pay off my giri here.”

“Skip it. On the house.”

“On the house?” She did something with her eyes that I liked. “What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

“No? Comeback flic, ‘bout ten years back.”

“Missed it. I’ve been away.”

Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party.

Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.

“They’re putting out a call,” she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. “I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.”

“It wasn’t shaping up for much anyway.”

She took a couple more steps away, then stopped. Under the vague caterwauling from the bar and the noise of the hosing station, I thought I could hear something massive powering up, tiny insistent whine behind the fabric of the night, sense of shifting potential, like carnival monsters getting into place behind a stage curtain. Light and shadow through the stanchions overhead made a splintered white mask of her face. One eye gleamed silver.

“You got a place to crash, Micky-san? You said a couple of hours. What do you plan to do until then?”

I spread my hands. Became aware of the knife, and stowed it.

“No plans.”

“No plans, huh?” There was no breeze coming in off the sea, but I thought her hair stirred a little. She nodded. “No place either, right?”

I shrugged again, fighting the rolling unreality of the H-grenade comedown, maybe something else besides. “That’s about the size of it.”

“So. Your plans are play tag with the TPD and the Beards for the rest of the night, try to see the sun come out in one piece. That it?”

“Hey, you should be writing experia. You put it like that, it sounds almost attractive.”

“Yeah. Fucking romantics. Listen, you want a place to crash until your high-grade friends are ready for you, that I can do. You want to play Micky Nozawa in the streets of Tekitomura, well.” She tilted her head again. ”I’ll ‘trode the flic when they make it.”

I grinned.

“Is it far?”

Her eyes shuttled left. “This way.”

From the bar, the cries of the deranged, a single voice shouting murder and holy retribution.

We slipped away among the cranes and shadows.

THREE

Kompcho was all light, ramp after sloping evercrete ramp aswarm with Angier lamp activity around the slumped and tethered forms of the hoverloaders. The vessels sprawled in their collapsed skirts at the end of the autograpples, like hooked elephant rays dragged ashore. Loading hatches gleamed open on their flaring flanks and illuminum painted vehicles manoeuvred back and forth on the ramps, offering up forklift arms laden with hardware. There was a constant backdrop of machine noise and shouting that drowned out individual voices. It was as if someone had taken the tiny glowing cluster of the hosing station four kilometres east and cultured it for massive, viral growth. Kompcho ate up the night in all directions with glare and sound.

We threaded our way through the tangle of machines and people, across the quay space behind the loader ramps. Discount hardware retailers piled high with aisles of merchandise shone neon pale at the base of the reclaimed wharf frontages, interspersed with the more visceral gleaming of bars, whorehouses and implant clinics. Every door was open, providing step-up access in most cases as wide as the frontage itself. Knots of customers spilled in and out. A machine ahead of me cut a tight circle, backing up with a load of Pilsudski ground profile smart bombs, alert blaring Watch it, Watch it, Watch it. Someone stepped sideways past me, grinning out of a face half metal.

She took me in through one of the implant parlours, past eight work chairs where lean-muscled men and women sat with gritted teeth, seeing themselves get augmented in the long mirror opposite and the banks of close-up monitors above. Probably not pain as such, but it can’t be much fun watching the flesh you wear sliced and peeled and shoved aside to make room for whatever new internal toy your sponsors have told you all the deCom crews are wearing this season.

She stopped by one chair and looked in the mirror at the shaven-headed giant it barely held. They were doing something to the bones in the right shoulder—a peeled-back flap of neck and collar hung down on a blood soaked towel in front. Carbon black neck tendons flexed restlessly in the gore within.

“Hey, Orr.”

“Hey! Sylvie!” The giant’s teeth appeared to be ungritted, eyes a little vacant with endorphins. He raised a languid hand on the side that was still intact and knocked fists with the woman. “You doing?”

“Out for a prowl. You sure this is going to heal by the morning?”

Orr jerked a thumb. “Or I do the same to this scalpelhead before we leave. Without chemicals.”

The implant operative smiled a tight little smile and went on with what he was doing. He’d heard it all before. The giant’s eyes switched to me in the mirror. If he noticed the blood on me, it didn’t seem to bother him.

Then again, he was hardly spotless himself.

“Who’s the synth?”

“Friend,” said Sylvie. “Talk to you upstairs.”

“Be up in ten.” He glanced at the operative. “Right?”

“Half an hour,” said the operative, still working. “The tissue bond needs setting time.”

“Shit.” The giant fired a glance at the ceiling. “Whatever happened to Urushiflash. That stuff bonds in seconds.”

Still working. A tubular needle made tiny sucking sounds. “You asked for the standard tariff, sam. Military-issue biochem isn’t available at that rate.”

“Well, for fuck’s sake what’s it going to cost me to upgrade to deluxe then?”

“About fifty per cent more.”

Sylvie laughed. “Forget it, Orr. You’re almost done. You won’t even get to enjoy the ‘dorphs.”

“Fuck that, Sylvie. I’m bored rigid here.” The giant spittled his thumb and held it out. “Swipe me up, you.”

The implant operative looked up, shrugged minutely and set down his tools on the operating palette.

“Ana,” he called. “Get the Urushiflash.”

While the attendant busied herself in a footlocker with the new biochemicals, the operative took a DNA reader from amidst the clutter on the mirror shelf and rubbed the upsoak end across Orr’s thumb. The machine’s hooded display lit and shifted. The operative looked back at Orr.

“This transaction will put you in the red,” he said quietly.

Orr glared. “Never fucking mind. I’m shipping out tomorrow, I’m good for it and you know it.”

The operative hesitated. “It is because you are shipping out tomorrow,” he began, “that—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Read the sponsor screen, will you. Fujiwara Havel. Making New Hok safe for a New Century. We’re not some goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. I don’t come back, the enka payment covers it. You know that.”

“It isn’t—”

The exposed tendons in Orr’s neck tensed and lifted. “Thefack are you, my accountant?” He levered himself up in the chair and stared into the operative’s face. “Just put it through, will you. And get me some of those milissue endorphins while you’re about it. I’ll take them later.”

We stayed long enough to see the implant operative cave in, then Sylvie nudged me away towards the back.

“We’ll be upstairs,” she said.

“Yeah.” The giant was grinning. “See you in ten.”

Upstairs was a spartan set of rooms wrapped around a kitchen/lounge combination with windows out onto the wharf. The soundproofing was good. Sylvie shrugged off her jacket and slung it over the back of a lounger. She looked back at me as she moved to the kitchen space.

“Make yourself at home. Bathroom in the back over there if you need to clean up.”

I took the hint, rinsed the worst of the gore off my hands and face in a tiny mirrored basin niche and came back out to the main room. She was over at the kitchen worksurface, searching cabinets.

“Are you really with Fujiwara Havel?”

“No.” She found a bottle and cracked it open, pinched up two glasses in her other hand. “We’re a goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. And then some. Orr just has a datarat tunnel into FH’s clearance codes. Drink?”

“What is it?”

She looked at the bottle. “Don’t know. Whisky.”

I held out my hand for one of the glasses. “Tunnel like that’s got to cost in the first place.”

She shook her head. “Fringe benefits of deCom. We’re all wired better for crime than a fucking Envoy. Got electronic intrusion gear up the ass.”

She handed me the glass and poured for both of us. The neck of the bottle made a single tiny clink in the quiet of the room each time it touched down. “Orr’s been out on the town for the last thirty-six hours, whoring and shooting chemicals on nothing but credit and enka payment promises. Same thing every time we ship out. Views it as an art form, I reckon. Cheers.”

“Cheers.” It was a very rough whisky. “Uhh. You been crewing with him long?”

She gave me an odd look. “Long enough. Why?”

“Sorry, force of habit. I used to get paid to soak up local information.” I raised the glass again. “Here’s to a safe return, then.”

“That’s considered bad luck.” She didn’t lift her own glass. “You really have been away, haven’t you.”

“For a while.”

“Mind talking about it?”

“Not if we sit down.”

The furniture was cheap, not even automould. I lowered myself carefully into a lounger. The wound in my side seemed to be healing, to the extent that synth flesh ever did.

“So.” She seated herself opposite me and pushed her hair away from her face. A couple of the thicker strands flexed and crackled faintly at the intrusion. “How long you been gone?”

“About thirty years, give or take.”

“Pre-beard, huh?”

Sudden bitterness. “Before this heavy stuff, yeah. But I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of other places. Sharya. Latimer. Parts of Adoracion.”

“Oh. Catch those names.”

I shrugged. “It’s where I’ve been.”

Behind Sylvie, an interior door unfolded crankily and a slight, cocky looking woman wandered yawning into the room, wrapped in a lightweight black polalloy skinsuit half unseamed. She put her head on one side as she spotted me and came to lean on the back of Sylvie’s lounger, scrutinising me with unapologetic curiosity. There were kanji characters shaved into her stubble length hair.

“Got company?”

“Glad to see you got those viewfinder upgrades at last.”

“Shut up.” She flicked idly at the other woman’s hair with hard-lacquered fingernails, grinning when the tresses crackled and shifted away from the touch.

“Who is this? Bit late for shore-leave romances, isn’t it?”

“This is Micky. Micky, meet Jadwiga.” The slight woman winced at the full name, mouthed the single syllable Jad. “And Jad. We are not fucking. He’s just crashing here.”

Jadwiga nodded and turned away, instantly disinterested. From the back, the kanji on her skull readjust don’t fucking miss. “We got any shiver left?”

“Think you and Las dropped it all last night.”

“All of it?”

“Jesus, Jad. It wasn’t my party. Try the box on the window.”

Jadwiga walked spring-heeled dancer’s steps across to the window and upended the box in question. A tiny vial fell out into her hand. She held it up to the light and shook it so the pale red liquid at the bottom quivered back and forth.

“Well,” she said meditatively. “Enough for a couple of blinks. Ordinarily I’d offer it round, but—”

“But instead you’re going to hog the whole lot yourself,” predicted Sylvie. “That old Newpest hospitality thing. Just gets me right there every time.”

“Oh look who’s talking, bitch,” said Jadwiga without heat. “How often, outside of mission time, you ever agree to hook us up to that mane of yours?”

“It isn’t the sa—”

“No, it’s better. You know for a Renouncer kid, you’re pretty fucking stingy with your capacity. Kiyoka says—”

“Kiyoka doesn’t—”

“Guys, guys.” I gestured for attention, broke the tightening cable of confrontation that was cranking Jadwiga back across the room towards Sylvie a couple of flexed steps at a time. “It’s okay. I’m not up for any recreational chemicals right now.”

Jad brightened. “See,” she told Sylvie.

“Although if I could beg some of Orr’s endorphins when he gets up here, I’d be grateful.”

Sylvie nodded, not looking away from her standing companion. She was clearly still miffed, either over the breach of host etiquette or the mention of her Renouncer background. I couldn’t work out which.

“Orr’s got endorphins?” Jadwiga wanted to know loudly.

“Yes,” said Sylvie. “He’s downstairs. Getting cut.”

Jad sneered. “Fucking fashion victim. He’s never going to learn.” She slipped a hand inside her unseamed suit and produced an eye-hypo.

Fingers programmed by obvious habit screwed the mechanism onto the end of the vial, then she tipped her head back and with the same automatic deftness spread the eyelids of one eye and fired the hypo into it. Her tight-cabled stance slackened, and the drug’s signature shudder dropped through her from the shoulders.

Shiver is pretty innocuous stuff—it’s about six-tenths betathanatine analogue, cut with a couple of take extracts that make everyday household objects dreamily fascinating and perfectly innocent conversational gambits sniggeringly hilarious. Fun if everyone in the room is dropping it, irritating for anyone left out. Mostly, it just slows you down, which I imagine was what Jad, in common with most deComs, was after.

“You’re from Newpest,” I asked her.

“Mm-mm.”

“What’s it like these days?”

“Oh. Beautiful.” A badly controlled smirk. “Best-looking swamp town in the southern hemisphere. Well worth a visit.”

Sylvie sat forward. “You from there, Micky?”

“Yeah. Long time ago.”

The apartment door chimed and then unfolded to reveal Orr, still stripped to the waist, right shoulder and neck liberally smeared with orange tissue weld. He grinned as he saw Jadwiga.

“So you’re up, are you?” Advancing into the room, dumping a fistful of clothing into the lounger beside Sylvie, who wrinkled her nose.

Jad shook her head and waved the empty vial at the giant. “Down. Definitely down. Chilled to flatline.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a drug problem, Jad?”

The slight woman dribbled sniggering, as poorly suppressed as the earlier smirk. Orr’s grin broadened. He mimed junkie trembling, a twitching, idiot face. Jadwiga erupted into laughter. It was infectious. I saw the smile on Sylvie’s face and caught myself chuckling.

“So where’s Kiyoka?” asked Orr.

Jad nodded back at the room she’d come out of. “Sleep.”

“And Lazlo’s still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?”

Sylvie looked up. “What’s that?”

Orr blinked. “You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko.” He pouted and squeezed his pectorals hard towards each other with the palms of both hands, then winced and stopped as the pressure touched his recent surgery. “Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.”

“She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament,” grinned Jadwiga.

“No consumer interest. Now I—”

“Any of you guys hear about the citadel?” I asked casually.

Orr grunted. “Yeah, caught the newscast downstairs. Some psycho offed half the head Beards in Tekitomura by the sound of it. They say there are stacks missing. Guy just carved them out of the spines like he’d been doing it all his life, apparently.”

I saw Sylvie’s gaze track down and across to the pocket of my coat, then up to meet my eyes.

“Pretty savage stuff,” said Jad.

“Yeah, but pretty pointless.” Orr acquired the bottle from where it stood on the kitchen bar worksurface. “Those guys can’t re-sleeve anyway. It’s an article of faith for them.”

“Fucking freaks.” Jadwiga shrugged and lost interest. “Sylvie says you scored some ‘dorphs downstairs.”

“Yes, I did.” The giant poured himself a glass of whisky with exaggerated care. “Thanks.”

“Ahhh, Orr. Come on.”

Later, with the lights powered down and the atmosphere in the apartment mellowed almost to comatose proportions, Sylvie shoved Jadwiga’s slumped form out of the way on the lounger and leaned across to where I sat enjoying the lack of pain in my side. Orr had long ago slipped away to another room.

“You did that?” she asked quietly. “That stuff up at the citadel?”

I nodded.

“Any particular reason?”

“Yeah.”

A small silence.

“So.” she said finally. “It wasn’t quite the Micky Nozawa rescue it looked like, huh? You were already cranked up.”

I smiled, slightly stoned on the endorphin. “Call it serendipity.”

“Alright. Micky Serendipity, that’s got a ring to it.” She frowned owlishly into the depths of her glass, which, like the bottle, had been empty for a while. “Got to say, Micky, I like you. Can’t put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.”

“I like you too.”

She wagged a finger, maybe the one she couldn’t quite put on my likeable qualities. “This is not. Sex. You know?”

“I know. Have you seen the size of the hole in my ribs?” I shook my head muzzily. “Of course you have. Spectrochem vision chip, right?”

She nodded complacently.

“You really from a Renouncer family?”

A sour grimace. “Yeah. From being the operative word.”

“They’re not proud of you?” I gestured at her hair. “I’d have thought that qualifies as a pretty solid step on the road to Upload. Logically—”

“Yeah, logically. This is a religion you’re talking about. Renouncers make no more fucking sense than the Beards when it comes down to it.”

“So they’re not in favour?”

“Opinion,” she said with mock delicacy, “is divided on the matter. The aspirant hardliners don’t like it, they don’t like anything that roots construct systems firmly to physical being. The preparant wing of the faith just want to play nice with everyone. They say any virtuality interface is, as you say, a step on the road. They don’t expect Upload to come in their lifetime anyway, we’re all just handmaidens to the process.”

“So which are your folks?”

Sylvie shifted her body on the lounger again, frowned and gave Jadwiga another shove to make space.

“Used to be moderate preps, that’s the faith I grew up in. The last couple of decades though, with the Beards and the whole anti-stack thing, a lot of moderates are turning into hardline asps. My mother probably went that way, she was always the seriously pious one.” She shrugged. “No idea really. Haven’t been home in years.”

“Like that, huh?”

“Yeah, like that. There’s no fucking point. All they’d do is try and marry me off to some eligible local.” She snorted with laughter. “As if that’s going to happen while I’m carrying this stuff.”

I propped myself up a little, groggy with the drugs. “What stuff?”

“This.” She tugged at a handful of hair. “This fucking stuff.”

It crackled quietly around her grasp, tried to writhe away like thousands of tiny snakes. Under the crinkled black and silver mass of it, the thicker cords moved stealthily, like muscles under skin.

DeCom command datatech.

I’d seen a few like her before—a prototype variant back on Latimer, where the core of the new Martian machine interface industry was boiling into R&D overdrive. A couple more used as minesweepers in the Hun Home system. It never takes long for the military to bastardise cutting edge technology for their own use. Makes sense. As often as not, they’re the ones paying for the R&D anyway.

“That’s not unattractive,” I said carefully.

“Oh, sure.” She raked through the tresses and separated out the central cord until it hung clear of the rest, an ebony snake gripped in her fist.

“That’s attractive, right? Because, after all, any red-blooded male’s just going to love a twice-prick-length member flopping around in bed at head height, right? Fucking competition anxiety and creeping homophobia, all in one.”

I gestured. “Well, women—”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m straight.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” She let the cord fall and shook her head so the rest of the silvered mane rearranged itself as it had been. “Oh.”

A century ago they were harder to spot. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal. Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different to the next human sleeve—a bit sick around the gills maybe when they’d been in the field for too long, but that’s the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say.

The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that. For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians’ interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot.

They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporisation of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels’ motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.

Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan’s World’s very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you’d call smart. Now here were the archaeologue systems specialists suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half million years old.

Some form of upgrade was in order. Definitely.

Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whisky glass.

“Why’d you sign up?” I asked her, to fill the quiet.

She shrugged. “Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.”

“And it isn’t?”

A wry grin. “No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.”

“The Initiative can’t last forever.”

“No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.”

“Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.”

“Well, spot the fucking offworlder.” She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. “Might not be big by your standards—I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Round here it’s a little different.”

I smiled. “I’m from here, Sylvie.”

“Oh, yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.”

In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.

You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar System with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

Well, wouldn’t you?

“I’m going to bed,” slurred Sylvie. “Busy day tomorrow.”

I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the

Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.

“Sylvie, it is tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated.

“ ‘loader doesn’t lift ‘til lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.”

“Thanks.”

She gave me a faded smile. “Hey, Micky. Least I can do. G’night.”

“ ‘night.”

I watched her wander to her room, checked my time chip and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.

That was the last conscious thought I had.

Fucking synth sleeves.

FOUR

The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering.

Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.

Shit.

Bang bang.

I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.

Bang, bang, bang.

“Fuck is that?” yelled someone from an inner room.

Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.

“Door,” I said, feeling foolish.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.”

The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.

“Will someone fucking answer that!” It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.

“Got it,” Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. “Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.”

She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.

“You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?” she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. “We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!”

There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad.

He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.

Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.

“Kovacs,” Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. “What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’d have thought that was my line.”

Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.

“You were told,” snapped Yukio, “to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?”

“These your high-powered friends, Micky?” It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.

I nodded. “You might say that.”

Yukio’s eyes flickered to the woman’s voice and he frowned. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him, maybe it was just the five to three disadvantage he’d just walked into.

“You know who I am,” he began. “So let’s not complicate matters any—”

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” said Sylvie evenly. “But I know you’re in our place without an invitation. So I think you’d better just leave.”

The yakuza’s face flared disbelief.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here.” Jadwiga threw up both hands in something midway between a combat guard and a gesture of obscene dismissal.

“Jad—” I started, but by then it had all already tipped too far.

Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me. Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it.

She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odour of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped.

I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns. I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad.

“Right.” Yukio looked around the rest of the room, wagging the blaster mainly in Sylvie’s direction. “That’s enough. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but you—”

Sylvie spat out a single word.

“Orr.”

Thunder detonated in the confined space again. This time, it was blinding.

I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still halfway up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down. His mouth gaped wide. His sun lenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare.

The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.

The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons.

The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up.

Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.

The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels.

“Well. That seemed to work.”

Orr stepped past me, peering down at what was apparently his handiwork.

He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back. They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her.

“Narrow beam,” he diagnosed. “Took out the heart and most of the right lung. Not much we can do for her here.”

“Someone close the door,” suggested Sylvie.

As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech. Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up.

“Report this?” Kiyoka, a slight woman in what had to be a custom-grown Maori sleeve, wanted to know. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip.

“To?” Orr flipped her a rapid thumb and little finger gesture. His other hand traced tattooing across his face.

“Oh. And him?”

Sylvie did something with her face, gestured low. I missed it, guessed and grabbed.

“They were here for me.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Orr was looking at me with something that grazed open hostility. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn’t hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast. “Some nice friends you’ve got.”

“I don’t think they would have got violent if Jad hadn’t jumped the goon. It was a misunderstanding.”

“Misunder—fuck.” Orr’s eyes widened. “Jad is dead, you asshole.”

“She’s not really dead,” I said doggedly. “You can excise the stack and—”

“Excise?” The word came out lethally soft. He trod closer, looming. “You want me to cut up my friend?”

Playing back the position of the gunmetal discharge tubes from memory, I guessed most of his right side was prosthetic, charging the five vents from a powerpack buried somewhere in the lower half of his ribcage.

Given recent advances in nanotech, you could get large blotches of energy to go pretty much anywhere you wanted over a limited distance. The nanocon shepherd fragments just rode the blast like surfers, sucking power and tugging the containment field wherever the launch data had them headed.

I made a mental note, if I had to hit him, to go left.

“I’m sorry. I don’t see another solution right now.”

“You—”

“Orr.” Sylvie made a sideways chopping gesture. “Tats, this place, time.” She shook her head. Another sign, thumb and forefinger forced apart by the fingers of the other hand. From the look on her face I got the sense she was emitting data through the team net as well. “Cache, the same. Three days. Puppetry. Torch and wipe, now.”

Kiyoka nodded. “Sense, Orr. Las? Oh.”

“Yeah, we can do that.” Orr wasn’t plugged all the way into this. He was still angry, speaking slowly. “Yeah, I mean. Okay.”

“ ‘ware?” Kiyoka again, some complex counting off from one hand, an inclination of her head. “Jet?”

“No, there’s time.” Sylvie made a flat-palmed motion. “Orr and Micky. Easy. You run blank. This, this, maybe this. Down.”

“Got it.” Kiyoka was checking out a retinal screen as she spoke, eyes up and left to skim the data Sylvie had shot her. “Las?”

“Not yet. I’ll flag you. Go.”

The Maori-sleeved woman disappeared back into her room, emerged a second later pulling on a bulky grey jacket and let herself out of the main door. She allowed herself a single backward look at Jadwiga’s corpse, then she was gone.

“Orr. Cutter.” A thumb at me. “Guevara.”

The giant gave me a final smouldering look and went to a case in the corner of the room, from which he took a heavy-bladed vibroknife. He came back and stood in front of me with the weapon, deliberately enough for me to tauten up. Only the obvious—that Orr didn’t need a knife to grease me—kept me from jumping him. My physical reaction must have been pretty obvious, because it got a derisive grunt out of the giant. Then he spun the knife in his hand and presented it to me grip first.

I took it. “You want me to do it?”

Sylvie moved across to Jadwiga’s corpse and stood looking down at the damage.

“I want you to dig out the stacks on your two friends there, yes. I think you’ve had the practice for it. Jad you can leave.”

I blinked.

“You’re leaving her?”

Orr snorted again. The woman looked at him and made a spiralling gesture. He compressed a sigh and went to his room.

“Let me worry about Jad.” Her face was clouded with distance, engaged at levels I couldn’t sense. “Just get cutting. And while you’re at it, you want to tell me who exactly we’ve killed here?”

“Sure.” I went to Yukio’s corpse and manhandled it onto what was left of its front. “This is Yukio Hirayasu—local yak, but he’s someone important’s son apparently.”

The knife burred into life in my hand, vibrations backing up unpleasantly as far as the wound in my side. I shook off a teeth-on-edge shiver, placed one cupped palm on the back of Yukio’s skull to steady it and started cutting into the spine. The mingled stink of scorched flesh and shit didn’t help.

“And the other one?” she asked.

“Disposable thug. Never seen him before.”

“Is he worth taking with us?”

I shrugged. “Better than leaving him here, I guess. You can toss him over the side halfway to New Hok. This one I’d keep for ransom, if I were you.”

She nodded. “What I thought.”

The knife bit down through the last millimetres of spinal column and sliced rapidly into the neck below. I switched off, changed grip and started a new cut, a couple of vertebrae lower down.

“These are heavyweight yakuza, Sylvie.” My guts were chilling over as I recalled my phone conversation with Tanaseda. The sempai had cut a deal with me purely on the strength of Yukio’s value in one piece. And he’d been pretty explicit about what would happen if things didn’t stay that way. “Millsport-connected, probably with First Family links. They’re going to come after you with everything they’ve got.”

Her eyes were unreadable. “They’re going to come after you too.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“That’s very generous of you. However,” she paused as Orr came back out of his room fully dressed and headed out the door with a curt nod, “I think we have this handled. Ki is off wiping our electronic traces now. Orr can torchblast every room in this place in about half an hour. That leaves them with nothing but—”

“Sylvie, this is the yakuza we’re talking about.”

“Nothing but eye witnesses, peripheral video data, and besides which we’ll be on our way to Drava in about two hours’ time. And no one’s going to follow us there.” There was a sudden, stiff pride in her voice. “Not the yakuza, not the First Families, not even the fucking Envoys. No one wants to fuck with the mimints.”

Like most bravado, it was misplaced. For one thing, I’d had it from an old friend six months back that Envoy Command had tendered for the New Hokkaido contract—they just hadn’t been cheap enough to suit the Mecsek government’s freshly rediscovered faith in unfettered market forces. A sneer across Todor Murakami’s lean face as we shared a pipe on the ferry from Akan to New Kanagawa. Fragrant smoke on the winter air of the Reach, and the soft grind of the maelstrom as backdrop. Murakami was letting his cropped Corps haircut grow out, and it stirred a little in the breeze off the water. He wasn’t supposed to be here, talking to me, but it’s hard to tell Envoys what to do. They know what they’re worth.

Hey, fuck Leo Mecsek. We told him what it’d cost. He can’t afford it, whose problem is that supposed to be? We’re supposed to cut corners and endanger Envoy lives, so he can hand the First Families back some more of the tax they pay? Fuck that. We’re not fucking locals.

You’re a local, Tod, I felt driven to point out. Millsport born and bred.

You know what I mean.

I knew what he meant. Local government don’t get to punch keys on the Envoy Corps. The Envoys go where the Protectorate needs them, and most local governments pray to whatever gods they give house room that they’ll never be found wanting enough for that contingency to be invoked.

The aftermath of Envoy intervention can be very unpleasant for all concerned.

This whole tendering angle’s fucked anyway. Todor plumed fresh smoke out over the rail. No one can afford us, no one trusts us. Can’t see the point, can you?

I thought it was about offsetting non-operational costs while you guys were sitting on your arses undeployed.

Oh, yeah. Which is when?

Really? I heard it was all pretty quiet right now. Since Hun Home, I mean.

Going to tell me some covert insurgency tales?

Hey, sam. He passed me the pipe. You’re not on the team any more.

Remember?

I remembered.

Innenin!

It bursts on the edges of memory like a downed marauder bomb going up distant, but not far enough off to be safe. Red laser fire and the screams of men dying as the Rawling virus eats their minds alive.

I shivered a little and drew on the pipe. With Envoy-tuned sensitivity, Todor spotted it and shifted subject.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime.

Yeah. I looked at him bleakly. Where’d you hear that then?

A shrug. Around. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?

The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu’s neck.

Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now.

Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior too, presumably.

Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuck-up he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan’s World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right. Organised crime is like that. Radul Segesvar’s Newpest haiduci mafia or the yak, north or south, they’re all the fucking same.

Fucking blood tie junkies.

War with the yakuza.

Why you going up north again? I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago.

“Micky?” For a moment, the name meant nothing to me. “Hey, Mick, you okay?”

I looked up. She was watching me with narrow concern. I forced a nod.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Well, do you think you could pick it up a bit? Orr’ll be back and he’ll want to get started.”

“Sure.” I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. “I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.”

“You’ll see.”

“Party trick, huh?”

She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamour of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.

“Why don’t you come with us, Micky?”

I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. “What?”

“Come with us.”

“To Drava?

“Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?”

I freed the blade and finished the incision. “I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.”

“What if I could set that up for you?”

“Sylvie.” I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward.

“Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?”

She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realisation that there was something here.

“Last time we were out,” she said slowly, “we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete re-sleeving unit and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.”

“Well, that’d make sense. That’s where you’re taking Jadwiga?”

She nodded.

I looked pensively at the chunk of spine in my hand, the ragged-lipped wound it had come out of. I thought about what the yakuza would do to me if they caught up with me in this sleeve.

“How long are you going over for?”

She shrugged. “Long as it takes. We’re provisioned for three months, but last time we filled our quota in half that time. You could come back sooner if you like. The ‘loaders run out of Drava all the time.”

“And you’re sure this stuff in the bunker is still functional.”

She grinned and shook her head.

“What?”

“It’s New Hok, Micky. Over there, everything’s still functional. That’s the whole problem with the fucking place.”

FIVE

The hoverloader Guns for Guevara was exactly what she sounded like—a low-profile, heavily armoured shark of a vessel, spiking weaponry along her back like dorsal spines. In marked contrast to the commercial ‘loaders that plied the routes between Millsport and the Saffron Archipelago, she had no external decks or towers. The bridge was a snubbed blister on the forward facings of the dull grey superstructure and her flanks swept back and out in smooth, featureless curves. The two loading hatches, open on either side of her nose, looked built to disgorge flights of missiles.

“You sure this is going to work?” I asked Sylvie as we reached the downward slope of the docking ramp.

“Relax,” growled Orr, behind me. “This isn’t the Saffron Line.”

He was right. For an operation that the government claimed was being run under stringent security guidelines, deCom embarkation struck me as sloppy in the extreme. At the side of each hatch, a steward in a soiled blue uniform was taking hardcopy documentation and running the authorisation flashes under a reader that wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a Settlement-Years experia flic. The ragged queues of embarking personnel snaked back and forth across the ramp, ankle deep in carry-on baggage.

Bottles and pipes passed back and forth in the cold, bright air. There was highly-strung hilarity and mock sparring up and down the lines, repeated jokes over the antique reader. The stewards smiled back repeatedly, wearily.

“And where the fuck is Las?” Kiyoka wanted to know.

Sylvie shrugged. “He’ll be here. He always is.”

We joined the back of the nearest queue. The little knot of deComs ahead of us glanced round briefly, spent a couple of measured looks on Sylvie’s hair, then went back to their bickering. She wasn’t unusual among this crowd. A tall, black sleeve a couple of groups down had a dreadlocked mane of similar proportions, and there were others less imposing here and there.

Jadwiga stood quiet beside me!

“This thing with Las is pathological,” Kiyoka told me, looking anywhere but at Jad. “He’s always fucking late.”

“It’s wired into him,” said Sylvie absently. “You don’t get to be a career wincefish without a tendency towards brinkmanship.”

“Hey, I’m a wincefish, and I turn up on time.”

“You’re not a lead wincefish,” said Orr.

“Oh, right. Listen we’re all—” she glanced at Jadwiga and bit her lip.

“Lead’s just a player position. Las is wired no different to me or—”

Looking at Jad, you’d never have guessed she was dead. We’d cleaned her up in the apartment—beam weapons cauterise, there’s not often much in the way of blood—rigged her in a tight marine surplus combat vest and jacket that covered the wounds, fitted heavy black EV lenses over her shocked open eyes. Then Sylvie got in through the team net and fired up her motor systems. I’d guess it took a little concentration, but nothing to the focus she’d have to have online when she deployed the team against the mimints on New Hok. She got Jad walking at her left shoulder and we formed a phalanx around them. Simple commands to facial muscles clamped the dead deCom’s mouth shut and the grey pallor, well, with the EV lenses on and a long grey sealwrap bag slung over one shoulder, Jad looked no worse than she should have done on a shiver comedown with added endorphin crash. I don’t suppose the rest of us looked too hot either.

“Authorisation, please.”

Sylvie handed over the sheaf of hardcopy, and the steward set about passing it through the reader one sheet at a time. She must have sent a tiny jolt through the net to the muscles in Jadwiga’s neck at the same time, because the dead woman tilted her head, a little stiffly, as if scanning the ‘loader’s armoured flank. Nice touch, very natural.

“Sylvie Oshima. Crew of five,” said the steward, looking up to count.

“Hardware already stowed.”

“That’s right.”

“Cabin allocation.” He squinted at the reader’s screen. “Sorted. P19 to 22, lower deck.”

There was a commotion back up near the top of the ramp. We all looked back, apart from Jadwiga. I spotted ochre robes and beards, angry gesticulating and voices raised.

“What’s going on?” asked Sylvie casually.

“Oh—Beards.” The steward shuffled the scanned documentation back together. “They’ve been prowling up and down the waterfront all morning. Apparently they had a run-in last night with a couple of deComs in some place way east of here. You know how they are about that stuff.”

“Yeah. Fucking throwbacks.” Sylvie took the paperwork and stowed it in her jacket. “They got descriptions, or will any two deComs do?”

The steward smirked. “No vid, they say. Place was using up all its capacity on holoporn. But they got a witness description. A woman. And a man. Oh, yeah, and the woman had hair.”

“Christ, that could be me.” laughed Sylvie.

Orr gave her a strange look. Behind us, the clamour intensified. The steward shrugged.

“Yeah, could be any of a couple of dozen command heads I passed through here this morning. Hey, what I want to know is, what are a bunch of priests doing in a place runs holoporn anyway?”

“Jerking off?” suggested Orr.

“Religion,” said Sylvie, with a sudden click in her throat as if she was going to vomit. At my side, Jadwiga swayed unsteadily, and twisted her head more abruptly than people generally do. “Has it occurred to anybody that—”

She grunted, gut deep. I shot a glance at Orr and Kiyoka, saw their faces go tight. The steward looked on, curious, not yet concerned.

“—that every human sacrament is a cheap evasion, that—”

Another choked sound. As if the words were being wrenched up out of somewhere buried in hard-packed silt. Jadwiga’s swaying worsened. Now the steward’s face began to change as he picked up the scent of distress.

Even the deComs in the queue behind us were shifting their attention from the brawl at the top of the ramp, narrowing in on the pale woman and the speech that came sputtering up out of her.

“—that the whole of human history might just be some fucking excuse for the inability to provide a decent female orgasm?

I trod on her foot, hard.

“Quite.”

The steward laughed nervously. Quellist sentiments, albeit early poetic ones, were still marked handle with care in the Harlan’s World cultural canon. Too much danger that any enthusiasm for them might spill over into her later political theory and, of course, practice. You can name your hoverloaders after revolutionary heroes if you want, but they need to be far enough back in history that no one can remember what they were fighting for.

“I—” said Sylvie, puzzled. Orr moved to support her.

“Let’s have this argument later, Sylvie. We’d better get stowed first. Look.” He nudged her. “Jad’s dead on her feet, and I don’t feel much better. Can we—”

She caught it. Straightened and nodded.

“Yeah, later,” she said. Jadwiga’s corpse stopped swaying, even lifted the back of one hand realistically to its brow.

“Comedown blues,” I said, winking at the steward. His nervousness ironed out and he grinned.

“Been there, man.”

Jeering from the top of the ramp. I heard the shouted word abomination, then the sound of electrical discharge. Probably power knuckles.

“Think they’ve reeled in more than they can stow up there,” said the steward, peering past us. “Should have come heavy, they’re going to mouth off like that to a dock full of deCom. Okay, that’s us. You can go through.”

We made it through the hatch without further stumbling from anybody, and went down metal-echoing corridors in search of the cabins. At my back, Jad’s corpse kept mechanical pace. The rest of the team acted like nothing had happened.

“So what the fuck was that?”

I finally got round to asking the question about half an hour later.

Sylvie’s crew stood around in her cabin, looking uncomfortable. Orr had to stoop below the reinforcing joists of the ceiling. Kiyoka stared out of the tiny one-way porthole, finding something of great interest in the water outside. Jadwiga lay face down on a bunk. Still no sign of Lazlo.

“It was a glitch,” said Sylvie.

“A glitch.” I nodded. “Does this kind of glitch happen often?”

“No. Not often.”

“But it has happened before.”

Orr ducked under a joist to loom over me. “Why don’t you give it a rest, Micky. No one forced you to come along. You don’t like the terms, you can just fuck off, can’t you.”

“I’m just curious to know what we do if Sylvie drops out of the loop and starts spouting Quellisms in the middle of a mimint encounter, that’s all.”

“Let us worry about the mimints,” said Kiyoka tonelessly.

“Yeah, Micky.” Orr sneered. “It’s what we do for a living. You just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

“All I want to—”

“You shut the fuck up if you—”

“Look.” She said it very quietly, but Orr and Kiyoka both hooked round towards the sound of her voice. “Why don’t you two leave me and Micky alone to talk about this?”

“Ah, Sylvie, he’s just—”

“He’s got a right to know, Orr. Now you want to give us some space?”

She watched them out, waited for the cabin door to fold, then went past me back to her seat.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Look.” It took me a moment to realise she meant it literally this time.

She reached into the mass of her hair and lifted the centre cord. “You know how this works. There’s more processing capacity in this than in most city databases. Has to be.”

She let the cord go and shook her hair across it. A small smile flickered around her mouth. “Out there, we can get a viral strike flung at us hard enough to scrape out a human mind like fruit pulp. Or just mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces.” She shivered a little. “Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.”

“Sounds like it’s time for some fresh hardware.”

“Yeah,” she grinned sourly. “I just don’t have that much loose change right now. Know what I mean?”

I did know. “Recent tech. It’s a fucker, huh?”

“Yeah. Recent tech, fucking indecent pricing. They take the Guild subsidies, the Protectorate defence funding and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R&D to people like me.”

I shrugged. “Price of progress.”

“Yeah, saw the ad. Assholes. Look, what happened back there is just gunge in the works, nothing to worry about. Maybe something to do with trying to hotwire Jad. That’s something I don’t do usually, it’s unused capacity. And that’s usually where the data management systems dump any trace junk. Running Jad’s CNS must have flushed it out.”

“Do you remember what you were saying?”

“Not really.” She rubbed at the side of her face, pressed fingertips against one closed eye. “Something about religion? About the Beards?”

“Well, yeah. You lifted off from there, but then you started paraphrasing early Quellcrist Falconer. Not a Quellist, are you?”

“Fuck, no.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She thought about it for a while. Under our feet, the Guns for Guevara’s engines began to thrum gently. Departure for Drava, imminent.

“Could be something I caught off a dissemination drone. There’s still a lot of them out in the east—not worth the bounty to decommission, so they get left alone unless they’re fucking up local comlinks.”

“Would any of them be Quellist?”

“Oh, yeah. At least four or five of the factions who fucked up New Hok were Quellist-inspired. Shit, from what I hear she was fighting up there herself back when the Unsettlement kicked off.”

“That’s what they say.”

The door chimed. Sylvie nodded at me, and I went to open it. Out in the faintly shuddering corridor stood a short, wiry figure with long black hair bound back in a ponytail. He was sweating heavily.

“Lazlo,” I guessed.

“Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”

“Long story. You want to talk to Sylvie?”

“That’d be nice.” The irony was ladled on. I stood aside and let him in.

Sylvie gave him a weary top-to-toe look.

“Got in the life-raft launcher,” Lazlo announced. “Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it.”

Sylvie sighed. “It’s not big, Las, it’s not clever and some day you’ll miss the fucking boat. What are we going to do for a lead then?”

“Well, looks to me like you’re already lining up replacements.” A cocked glance in my direction. “Who is this, exactly?”

“Micky, Lazlo.” An idle gesture back and forth between us. “Lazlo, meet Micky Serendipity. Temporary travelling companion.”

“Did you get him aboard with my flashes?”

Sylvie shrugged. “You never use them.”

Lazlo spotted Jadwiga’s form on the bed and a grin lit up his bony face.

He strode across the cabin and slapped her on one buttock. When she didn’t respond, he frowned. I shut the door.

“Jesus, what did she take last night?”

“She’s dead, Las.”

“Dead?

“For the moment, yes.” Sylvie looked across at me. “You’ve missed rather a lot of the dance since yesterday.”

Lazlo’s eyes followed Sylvie’s gaze across the cabin. “And it all has something to do with tall, dark and synthetic there, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

Lazlo went across to the basin niche and ran water into his cupped hands. He lowered his face into the water and snorted. Then he wiped the surplus water back through his hair, straightened up and eyed me in the mirror. He turned pointedly towards Sylvie.

“Alright, skipper. I’m listening.”

SIX

It took a day and a night to get to Drava.

From about midway across the Andrassy Sea, Guns for Guevara ran throttled back, sensor net spread as wide as it would go, weapons systems at standby. The official line from the Mecsek government was that the mimints had all been designed for a land war and so had no way of getting off New Hok. On the ground, deCom crews reported seeing machines there were no descriptors for in the Military Machine Intelligence archive, which suggested at least some of the weaponry still prowling the continent had found ways to evolve beyond its original programme parameters. The whispered word was that experimental nanotech had run wild. The official line said nanotech systems were too crude and too poorly understood at the time of the Unsettlement to have been deployed as weapons. The whispered word was dismissed as anti-government scaremongering, the official line was derided in every place you could find intelligent conversation.

Without satellite cover or aerial support, there was no way to prove the thing either way. Myth and misinformation reigned.

Welcome to Harlan’s World.

“Hard to believe,” muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometres up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. “Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.”

Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armoured spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivvied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side.

Overhead, the sky was an unpromising grey in all directions.

Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. “Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.”

“Yeah, count me in,” said Kiyoka. “Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.”

It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analogue of the fifty metre bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars.

No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all human scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a lance of angel fire.

Lazlo blew on his hands. “They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.”

“Oh, man, here we go again.” Kiyoka rolled her eyes.

“There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,” said Lazlo doggedly.

“Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—”

Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.

“—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches them when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens all the time, man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—”

“I did hear that one,” said Sylvie irritably. “Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.”

“Skipper, they said that, sure. They would say that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Las, old son.” Orr dropped a heavy arm around the lead wincefish’s shoulders. “If it’d been angelfire, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. You know that. And you know damn well there’s a fucking hole in the coverage down around the equator big enough to drive a whole fleet of colony barges through if you do the math right. Now why don’t you give the conspiracy shit a rest and check out the scenery you dragged us all up here to see.”

It was an impressive enough sight. Drava, in its day, was both trade gateway and naval port for the whole New Hokkaido hinterland. The waterfront saw shipping from every major city on the planet and the sprawl of architecture behind the docks reached back a dozen kilometres into the foothills to provide homes for almost five million people. At the height of its commercial powers, Drava rivalled Millsport for wealth and sophistication, and the navy garrison was one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere.

Now we cruised past rows of smashed-in Settlement-Years warehouses, containers and cranes tumbled across the docks like children’s toys and merchant vessels sunk at anchor end to end. There were lurid chemical stains on the water around us, and the only living things in view were a miserable-looking clutch of ripwings flapping about on the canted, corrugated roof of a warehouse. One of them flung back its neck and uttered a clattering challenge as we went past, but you could tell its heart wasn’t in it.

“Want to watch out for those,” said Kiyoka grimly. “They don’t look like much but they’re smart. Most places on this coast they’ve already polished off the cormorants and the gulls, and they’ve been known to attack humans too.”

I shrugged. “Well, it’s their planet.”

The deCom beachhead fortifications came into view. Hundreds of metres of razor-edged livewire crawling restlessly about inside its patrol parameters, jagged rows of crouched spider blocks on the ground and robot sentries perched brooding on the surrounding rooftops. In the water, a couple of automated minisubs poked conning towers above the surface, bracketing the curve of the estuary. Surveillance kites flew at intervals, tethered to crane stacks and a communications mast in the heart of the beachhead.

Guns for Guevara cut power and drifted in broadside between the two subs. On the dockside, a few figures paused in what they were doing and voices floated across the closing gap to the new arrivals. Most of the work was done by machines, silently. Beachhead security interrogated the hoverloader’s navigational intelligence and gave clearance. The auto grapple system talked to the sockets on the dock, agreed trajectory and fired home. Cables cranked tight and pulled the vessel in. An articulated boarding corridor flexed itself awake and nuzzled up to the dockside loading hatch. Buoyancy antigrav kicked over to mooring levels with a shiver. Doors unlatched.

“Time to go,” said Lazlo, and disappeared below like a rat down a hole.

Orr made an obscene gesture in his wake.

“What you bring us up here in the first place for, you’re in such a fucking hurry to get off?”

An indistinct answer floated back up. Feet clattered on the companionway.

“Ah, let him go,” said Kiyoka. “No one rolls ‘til we talk to Kurumaya anyway. There’ll be a queue around the ‘fab.”

Orr looked at Sylvie. “What are we going to do about Jad?”

“Leave her here.” The command head was gazing out at the ugly grey bubblefab settlement with a curiously rapt expression on her face. Hard to believe it was the view—maybe she was listening to the machine systems talk, senses open and lost in the wash of transmission traffic. She snapped out of it abruptly and turned to face her crew. “We’ve got the cabins ‘til noon. No point in moving her until we know what we’re doing.”

“And the hardware?”

Sylvie shrugged. “Same applies. I’m not carting that lot around Drava all day while we wait for Kurumaya to give us a slot.”

“Think he’ll ramp us again?”

“After last time? Somehow I doubt it.”

Below deck, the narrow corridors were plugged up with jostling deComs, carry-on gear slung across shoulders or portered on heads.

Cabin doors stood folded open, occupants within rationalising baggage prior to launching themselves into the crush. Boisterous shouts ricocheted back and forth over heads and angled cases. Motion was sludgily forward and port, towards the debarkation hatch. We threaded ourselves into the crowd and crept along with it, Orr in the lead. I hung back, protecting my wounded ribs as much as I could. Occasional jolts got through. I rode it with gritted teeth.

What seemed like a long time later, we spilled out the end of the debarkation corridor and stood amidst the bubblefabs. The deCom swarm drifted ahead of us, through the ‘fabs and towards the centre mast.

Part way there, Lazlo sat waiting for us on a gutted plastic packing crate.

He was grinning.

“What kept you?”

Orr feinted at him with a growl. Sylvie sighed.

“At least tell me you got a queue chip.”

Lazlo opened his hand with the solemnity of a conjuror and presented a little fragment of black crystal on his palm. The number fifty-seven resolved itself from a blurred point of light inside. A string of muttered curses smoked off Sylvie and her companions at the sight.

“Yeah, it’ll be a while.” Lazlo shrugged. “Leftovers from yesterday. They’re still assigning the backlog. I heard something serious went down inside the Cleared Zone last night. We may as well eat.”

He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap moulded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out towards us, pungent enough to trigger even the meagre taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.

“Misos and rice all round?” asked Lazlo.

Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.

“Hey. On me, this.”

“Thanks.”

“No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.”

“Well, there was a lot going on.”

“Yeah. You want anything else?”

There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own and tossed it onto the counter.

“So you got tagged.”

“Yeah. Ribs.”

“Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?”

“No. Before that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Busy man.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” I tore dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.

The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering.

Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-Years jazz.

Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place—old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-Years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualised. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.

“This is old,” I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.

Lazlo grunted. “Welcome to New Hok.”

Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.

“You like this stuff, huh?” Kiyoka asked me through a mouthful of rice.

“Stuff like it. I don’t recognise—”

“Dizzy Csango and Great Laughing Mushroom,” said Orr unexpectedly. “Down the Ecliptic. But it’s a cover of a Blackman Taku float, originally. Taku never would have let the violin in the front door.”

I shot the giant a strange look.

“Don’t listen to him.” Sylvie told me, scratching idly under her hair.

“You go back to early Taku and Ide stuff, they’ve got that gypsy twang scribbled all over the place. They only phased it out for the Millsport sessions.”

“That isn’t—”

“Hey, Sylvie!” A youngish-looking command head with hair static stacked straight up paused at the table. There was a tray of coffees balanced on his left hand and a thick coil of livecable slung over his right shoulder, twitching restlessly. “You guys back already?”

Sylvie grinned. “Hey Oishii. Miss me?”

Oishii made a mock-bow. The tray on his splayed fingers never shifted.

“As ever. More than can be said for Kurumaya-san. You plan on seeing him today?”

“You don’t?”

“Nah, we’re not going out. Kasha caught some counterint splash last night, it’ll be a couple of days before she’s up and about. We’re kicking back.” Oishii shrugged. “It’s paid for. Contingency funding.”

“Fucking contingency fund?” Orr sat up. “What happened here yesterday?”

“You guys don’t know?” Oishii looked around the table, eyes wide. “About last night. You didn’t hear?”

“No,” said Sylvie patiently. “Which is why we’re asking you.”

“Oh, okay. I thought everyone would know by now. We’ve got a coop cluster on the prowl. Inside the Cleared Zone. Last night it started putting together artillery. Self-propelled gun, a big one. Scorpion chassis. Kurumaya had to scramble everybody before we got shelled.”

“Is there anything left?” asked Orr.

“They don’t know. We took down the primary assemblers along with the gun, but a lot of the smaller stuff scattered. Drones, secondaries, shit like that. Someone said they saw karakuri.”

“Oh crabshit,” Kiyoka snorted.

Oishii shrugged again. “Just what I heard.”

“Mech puppets? No fucking way.” Kiyoka was warming to her theme.

“There haven’t been any karakuri in the CZ for better than a year.”

“Haven’t been any co-op machines either,” pointed out Sylvie. “Shit happens. Oishii, you think there’s any chance we’ll get assigned today?”

“You guys?” Oishii’s grin reappeared. “No way, Sylvie. Not after last time.”

Sylvie nodded glumly. “That’s what I thought.”

The jazz track faded out on a lifting note. A voice surged into place behind it, throaty, female, insistent. There was an archaic lilt to the words it used.

“And there Dizzy Csango’s push on the classic Down the Ecliptic, new light shed on an old theme, just in the manner Quellism illuminates those ancient iniquities of the economic order we have carried with us all the darkened way from the shores of Earth. Naturally, Dizzy was a confirmed Quellist all of his life, and as he many times said—”

Groans went up from the gathered deComs.

“Yeah, fucking methhead junkie all his life too,” yelled someone.

The propaganda DJ warbled on amidst the jeers. She’d been singing the same hardwired song for centuries. But the deCom complaints sounded comfortable, habit as well-worn as our protests had been at Watanabe’s place. Orr’s detailed knowledge of Settlement-Years jazz began to make some sense.

“Got to hop,” said Oishii. “Maybe catch up with you in the Uncleared, yeah?”

“Maybe, yeah.” Sylvie watched him leave, then leaned in Lazlo’s direction.

“How we doing for time?”

The wincefish dug in his pocket and displayed the queue chip. The numbers had shifted to fifty-two. Sylvie blew a disgusted breath.

“So what are karakuri?” I asked.

“Mech puppets.” Kiyoka was dismissive. “Don’t worry, you aren’t going to see any around here. We cleaned them out last year.”

Lazlo stuck the chip back in his pocket. “They’re facilitator units. Come in all shapes and sizes, little ones start about the size of a ripwing, only they don’t fly. Arms and legs. Armed, sometimes, and they’re fast.” He grinned.

“Not a lot of fun.”

A sudden, impatient tightening from Sylvie. She got up.

“I’m going to talk to Kurumaya,” she announced. “I think it’s time to volunteer our services for cleanup.”

General protest, louder than the propaganda DJ had elicited.

“—cannot be serious.”

“Clean-up pays shit, skipper.”

“Fucking grubbing about door-to-door—”

“Guys,” she held up her hands. “I don’t care, alright. If we don’t jump the queue, we’re not getting out of here ‘til tomorrow. And that’s no fucking good. In case any of you’ve forgotten, pretty soon Jad is going to start smelling antisocial.”

Kiyoka looked away. Lazlo and Orr muttered into the dregs of their miso soup.

“Anyone coming with me?”

Silence and averted gazes. I glanced around, then propped myself upright, luxuriating in the new absence of pain.

“Sure. I’ll come. This Kurumaya doesn’t bite, does he?”

In fact, he looked as if he might.

On Sharya there was a nomad leader I once had dealings with, a sheikh with wealth stacked away in databases all over the planet who chose to spend his days herding semi-domesticated genetically-adapted bison back and forth across the Jahan steppe and living out of a solar-powered tent.

Directly and indirectly, nearly a hundred thousand hardened steppe nomads owed him allegiance under arms, and when you sat in council with him in that tent, you felt the command coiled inside him.

Shigeo Kurumaya was a paler edition of the same figure. He dominated the command ‘fab with the same close-mouthed, hard-eyed intensity, for all that he was seated behind a desk laden with monitoring equipment and surrounded by a standing phalanx of deComs awaiting assignment. He was a command head like Sylvie, grey-and black-streaked hair braided back to reveal the central cord bound up in samurai style a thousand years out of date.

“Special dep, coming through.” Sylvie shouldered a path for us through the other deComs. “Coming through. Special dep. Goddamn it, give me some space here. Special dep.”

They gave ground grudgingly and we got to the front. Kurumaya barely looked up from his conversation with a team of three deComs sleeved in the slim-young-thing look I was starting to identify as wincefish standard.

His face was impassive.

“You’re on no special deployment that I know of, Oshima-san,” he said quietly, and around us the deComs exploded in angry reaction. Kurumaya stared back and forth at them and the noise quieted.

“As I said—”

Sylvie made a placatory gesture. “I know. Shigeo, I know I don’t have it. I want it. I’m volunteering the Slipins for karakuri cleanup.”

That got some surf, but subdued this time. Kurumaya frowned.

“You’re asking for cleanup?”

“I’m asking for a pass. The guys have run up some heavy debt back home, and they want to get earning six hours ago. If that means door-to door, we’ll do it.”

“Get in the motherfucking queue, bitch,” said someone behind us.

Sylvie stiffened slightly, but she didn’t turn round. “I might have guessed you’d see it like that, Anton. Going to volunteer too, are you? Take the gang on house-to-house. Don’t see them thanking you for that, somehow.”

I looked back at the gathered deComs and found Anton, big and blocky looking beneath a command mane dyed a half dozen violently clashing colours. He’d had his eyes lensed so the pupils looked like steel bearings and there were traceries of circuitwork under the skin of his Slavic cheekbones.

He twitched a little, but he made no move towards Sylvie. His metallic dull eyes went to Kurumaya.

“Come on, Shigeo,” Sylvie grinned. “Don’t tell me these people are all queuing up for cleaning duty. How many old hands are going to volunteer for this shit. You’re sending the sprogs out on this one, because nobody else will do it for the money. I’m offering you a gift here, and you know it.”

Kurumaya looked her up and down, then nodded the three wincefish aside. They stepped back with sullen expressions. The holomap winked out. Kurumaya leaned back in his chair and stared at Sylvie.

“Oshima-san, the last time I ramped you ahead of schedule, you neglected your assigned duties and disappeared north. How do I know you won’t do the same thing this time?”

“Shig, you sent me to look at wreckage. Someone got there before us, there was nothing left. I told you that.”

“When you finally resurfaced, yes.”

“Oh, be reasonable. How was I supposed to deCom what’s already been trashed? We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. How can I trust you this time?”

Sylvie gave out a performance sigh. “Jesus, Shig. You’ve got the excess capacity ponytail, you do the math. I’m offering you a favour in return for the chance to make some quick cash. Otherwise, I’ve got to wait to clear the queue some time day after tomorrow, you get nothing but sprog sweepers, everybody loses. What’s the fucking point of that?”

For a long moment, no one moved. Then Kurumaya glanced aside at one of the units on the desk. A datacoil awoke above it.

“Who’s the synth?” he asked casually.

“Oh.” Sylvie made may-I-present gestures. “New recruit. Micky Serendipity. Ordnance backup.”

Kurumaya raised an eyebrow. “Since when does Orr need or want help from anybody?”

“It’s just a try-out. My idea.” Sylvie smiled brightly. “Way I see it, you never can be too backed up out there.”

“That may be so.” Kurumaya turned his gaze on me. “But your new friend here is carrying damage.”

“It’s just a scratch,” I told him.

Colours shifted in the datacoil. Kurumaya glanced sideways and figures coalesced near the apex. He shrugged.

“Very well. Be at the main gate in an hour, bring your gear. You’ll get standard maintenance rate per day plus ten per cent seniority increment. That’s the best I can do. Bonus for any kills you make, MMI chart value.”

She gave him another brilliant smile. “That’ll do fine. We’ll be ready. Nice doing business with you again, Shigeo. Come on, Micky.”

As we turned to go, her face twitched with incoming traffic. She jerked back round to look at Kurumaya, irritated.

“Yes?”

He smiled gently at her. “Just so we’re clear, Oshima-san. You’ll be webbed into a sweep pattern with the others. If you do try and slide out again, I’ll know. I’ll pull your authorisation and I’ll have you brought back in, if I have to deploy the whole sweep to do it. You want to be arrested by a bunch of sprogs and then frogmarched back here, you just try me.”

Sylvie produced another sigh, shook her head sorrowfully and walked out through the throng of queuing deComs. As we passed Anton, he showed his teeth.

“Maintenance rate, Sylvie,” he sneered. “Looks like you found your level at last.”

Then he flinched, his eyes fluttered upward and his expression blanked as Sylvie reached in and twisted something inside his head. He swayed and the deCom next to him had to grab his arm to steady him. He made a noise like a freak fighter taking a heavy punch. Slurred voice, thick with outrage.

“Fucking—”

“Back off, swamp boy.” It trailed out behind her, laconic, as we left the ‘fab.

She hadn’t even looked in his direction.

SEVEN

The gate was a single slab of grey alloy armouring six metres across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-metre towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the grey metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.

Kurumaya’s clean-up volunteers stood about in small knots before the gate, muttered conversation laced with brief flares of loud bravado. As Sylvie had predicted, most were young and inexperienced, both qualities telegraphed clearly in the awkwardness with which they handled their equipment and gawked around them. The sparse assortment of hardware they had was none too impressive either. Weaponry looked to be largely obsolete military surplus, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen vehicles all told—transport for maybe half of the fifty-odd deComs present, some of it not even grav-effect. The rest, it seemed, were doing the sweep on foot.

Command heads were few and far between.

“How it’s done,” said Kiyoka complacently. She leaned back on the nose of the grav bug I was riding and folded her arms. The little vehicle rocked slightly on its parking cushion and I upped the field to compensate. “See, most sprogs got no money to speak of, they come into the game practically systems-blind. Try and earn cash for the upgrades with clean-up work and maybe some easy bounty on the edges of the Uncleared. If they get lucky, they do good work and someone notices them. Maybe some crew with losses takes them on.”

“And if not?”

“Then they go grow their own hair.” Lazlo grinned up from the opened pannier he was rifling through on one of the other two bugs. “Right, skipper?”

“Yeah, just like that.” There was a sour edge in Sylvie’s voice. Stood near the third bug with Orr for company, she was once again trying to make Jadwiga look like a living human being and the strain was showing. I wasn’t enjoying the process much myself—we’d got the dead deCom mounted on one of the bugs, but piloting the vehicle second-hand was beyond Sylvie’s control options, so Jad rode pillion behind me. It would have looked pretty strange if I’d got off while we waited and she’d stayed sitting there, so I stayed aboard too. Sylvie had the corpse drape one arm affectionately on my shoulder and left the other resting on my thigh. From time to time, Jadwiga’s head swivelled and her sunlensed features flexed in something approximating a grin. I tried to look casual about it.

“You don’t want to listen to Las,” Kiyoka advised me. “Not one in twenty sprogs is going to have what it takes to make Command. Sure, they could wire the stuff into your head, but you’d just go insane.”

“Yeah, like the skipper here.” Lazlo finished with the pannier, resealed it and wandered round to the other side.

“What happens,” said Kiyoka patiently. “You look for someone who can stand the heat and you form a co-op. Pool funds ‘til you can pay for them to get the hair plus basic plug-in for everybody else, and there you go. Brand new crew. What’re you looking at?”

This last to a young deCom who’d wandered over to stare enviously at the grav bugs and the equipment they mounted. He backed up a little at Kiyoka’s tone, but the hunger in his face stayed.

“Dracul line, right?” he said.

“That’s right.” Kiyoka rapped knuckles on the bug’s carapace. “Dracul Forty-One series, only three months off the Millsport factory lines and everything you heard about it is one hundred per cent true. Cloaked drives, internally mounted EMP and particle beam battery, fluid response shielding, integrated Nuhanovic smart systems. You name it, they built it in.”

Jadwiga twisted her head in the young deCom’s direction, and I guessed the dead mouth was trying on its grin again. Her hand moved off my shoulder and down my side. I shifted slightly in the seat.

“What’d it cost?” asked our new fan. Behind him, a small crowd of likeminded hardware enthusiasts was gathering.

“More than any of you’ll earn this year.” Kiyoka gestured airily. “Basic package starts at a hundred and twenty grand. And this is not the basic package.”

The young deCom took a couple of steps closer. “Can I—”

I speared him with a look. “No you can’t. I’m sitting on this one.”

“Come over here, kid.” Lazlo rapped on the carapace of the bug he was messing about with. “Leave the lovebirds alone—they’re both too hung over for manners. I’ll show you this one. Give you something to aspire to next season.”

Laughter. The little group of sprogs drifted in towards the invitation. I exchanged relieved glances with Kiyoka. Jadwiga patted my thigh and nestled her head on my shoulder. I glared across at Sylvie. Behind us, an address system cleared its throat.

“Gate release in five minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Check your tags.”

Whine of grav motors, minute scrape of poorly aligned rail runners. The gate lifted jerkily to the top of its twenty-metre run and the deComs trudged or rode, according to their finances, through the space beneath.

The livewire coiled and snaked back from the clean field our tags threw down, building itself into restless hedges over head height. We moved along a cleared path whose sides undulated like something out of a bad take dream.

Further out, the spider blocks shifted on their multiple haunches as they detected the approaching tag fields. When we got closer, they heaved their massive polyhedral bodies up off the cracked evercrete and scuttled aside in reverse imitation of their programmed block-and-crush function. I rode between them with wary attention. One night on Hun Home, I’d sat behind the fortifications of the Kwan Palace and listened to the screams as machines like these wiped out an entire assault wave of insurgent techninjas. For all their bulk and blind sluggishness, it hadn’t taken them very long.

Fifteen carefully negotiated minutes later, we cleared the beachhead’s defences and spilled untidily out into the streets of Drava. The dock surfacing gave way to rubble-strewn thoroughfares and sporadically intact apartment buildings averaging twenty storeys high. The style was Settlement-Years utilitarian standard—this close to the water, accommodation had been thrown up to serve the fledgling port, with little thought for aesthetics. Rows of small, recessed windows peered myopically out towards the sea. The raw evercrete walls were scarred from bombardment and worn from centuries of neglect. Bluish grey patches of lichen marked the places where the antibiotic sheathing had failed.

Overhead, watery sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and filtering down into the silent streets ahead. A gusting wind blew in off the estuary, seeming to hurry us forward. I glanced back and saw the livewire and spider blocks reknit behind us like a healing wound.

“Better get on with it, I suppose.” Sylvie’s voice, at my shoulder. Orr had ridden the other bug up parallel and the command head was seated behind him, head weaving back and forth as if seeking a scent. “At least it’s not raining.”

She touched a control on the coms jacket she wore. Her voice leapt out in the quiet, reverberated off the deserted façades. The deComs turned at the sound, keyed up and expectant as a pack of hunting dogs.

“Alright, friends. Listen up. Without wishing to take unseemly command here—”

She cleared her throat. Whispered.

“But someone, if not I then—”

Another cough.

“Someone has to fucking do something. This is not another exercise in, in.” She shook her head slightly. Her voice gathered strength, echoed off the walls again. “This is not some fucking political masturbation fantasy we’re fighting for, these are facts. Those in power have formed their alliances, shown their allegiance or lack of it, made their choices. And our choices in turn have been taken from us. I don’t want, I don’t want—”

She choked off. Head lowered.

The deComs stood still, waiting. Jadwiga slumped against my back, then started to slide out of the pillion seat. I grabbed backwards with one arm and stopped her. Flinched as pain sparkled through the soft woollen grey of the painkillers.

“Sylvie.” I hissed it across the space between us. “Get a fucking grip, Sylvie. Pull out of there.”

She looked up at me through the tangled mess of her hair, and for a long moment it was as if I was a total stranger.

“Get a grip,” I repeated softly.

She shuddered. Sat up and cleared her throat again. Waved one arm airily.

“Politics,” she declaimed, and the waiting crowd of deComs laughed. She waited it out. “Not what we are here for, ladies and gentlemen. I’m aware that I’m not the only hairhead among us, but I think I probably rank the rest of you in terms of experience, so. For those of you who aren’t too sure how this works, here’s what I suggest. Radial search pattern, splitting off at every junction until each motorised crew has a street to itself. The rest of you can follow who you like but I’d advise no less than a half dozen in each search line. Motorised crews lead on each street, those of you unlucky enough to be on foot get to check the buildings. Long pause at each building search, motorised guys don’t get ahead of the pattern, indoor guys call in backup from the riders outside if you see anything that might be mimint activity. Anything at all.”

“Yeah, what about the bounty?” yelled someone.

A surging murmur of agreement.

“What I take down is mine, ain’t here for sharing it out,” agreed someone else loudly.

Sylvie nodded.

“You will find.” Her amplified voice trod down the dissent. “That successful deCom has three stages. First you take down your mimint. Then you register the claim for it. Then you have to live long enough to get back to the beachhead and pick up the money. The last two stages of that process are especially hard to do if you’re lying back there in the street with your guts spilled and your head gone. Which is more than likely what’ll happen if one of you tries to take down a karakuri nest without help. The word crew has connotations. Those of you who aspire to be in a crew at some stage, I suggest you meditate upon that.”

The noise fizzled out into muttering. Behind me, Jadwiga’s corpse straightened up and took the weight off my arm. Sylvie surveyed her audience.

“Right. Now the radial pattern is going to fan us out pretty fast, so keep your mapping gear online at all times. Tag every street when you’re done, stay in contact with each other and be prepared to double back to cover the gaps as the pattern opens up. Spatial analysis. Remember, the mimints are fifty times as good as us at this. If you leave a gap they’ll spot it and use it.”

“If they’re there at all,” came another voice from the crowd.

“If they’re there at all,” agreed Sylvie. “Which they may or may not be. Welcome to New Hok. Now.” She stood up on the grav bug’s running boards and looked around. “Does anyone have anything constructive to say?”

Quiet. Some shuffling.

Sylvie smiled. “Good. Then let’s get on with this sweep, shall we. Radial search, as agreed. Scan up.”

A ragged cheer went up and fists brandished hardware. Some moron fired a blaster bolt into the sky. Whoops followed, volcanic enthusiasm.

“…kick some motherfucking mimint ass …”

“Going to make a pile, man. A fucking pile.”

“Drava baby, here we come!”

Kiyoka cruised up on my other flank and winked at me.

“They’re going to need all of that,” she said. “And then some. You’ll see.”

An hour in, I knew what she meant.

It was slow, frustrating work. Move fifty metres down a street at webjelly pace, skirting fallen debris and dead ground cars. Watch the scans. Stop.

Wait for the foot sweepers to penetrate the buildings on either side and work their way up twenty-odd levels one creeping step at a time. Listen to their structure-skewed coms transmission. Watch the scans. Tag the building clear. Wait for the foot sweepers to come down. Watch the scans. Move on, another halting fifty-metre stretch. Watch the scans. Stop.

We found nothing.

The sun fought a losing battle against the cloud cover. After a while, it started to rain.

Watch the scans. Move on up the street. Stop.

“Not all it’s cracked up to be in the ads, eh?” Kiyoka sat beneath the magical splatter of rain off her bug’s invisible screens and nodded at the foot sweepers as they disappeared into the latest façade. They were already drenched and the tense, flicker-eyed excitement of an hour ago was fading fast. “Opportunity and adventure in the fallow land of New Hok. Bring an umbrella.”

Seated behind her, Lazlo grinned and yawned. “Knock it off, Ki. Everyone’s got to start somewhere.”

Kiyoka leaned back in the seat, looking over her shoulder. “Hey, Sylvie. How much longer are we going to—”

Sylvie made a sign, one of the terse coded gestures I’d seen in action in the aftermath of the firefight with Yukio. Envoy focus gave me the quiver of one eyelid from Kiyoka as she ate up data from the command head.

Lazlo nodded contentedly to himself.

I tapped the comset they’d given me in lieu of a direct line into the command head’s skull.

“Something going on I should know about, Sylvie?”

“Nah.” Orr’s voice came back, dismissive. “We’ll cut you in when you need to know something. Right, Sylvie?”

I looked back at her. “Right, Sylvie?”

She smiled a little wearily. “Now isn’t the time, Micky.”

Watch the scans. Move along the rain-damp, damaged streets. The screens on the bugs made shimmering oval umbrellas of rainsplash over our heads, the foot sweepers cursed and got wet.

We found nothing.

By midday, we were a couple of kilometres into the city and operational tension had given way to boredom. The nearest crews were a half dozen streets away on either side. Their vehicles showed up on the mapping equipment in lazily slewed parking formations and if you tuned to the general channel, you could hear the foot sweepers grumbling their way up and down buildings, all trace of the earlier make-a-killing enthusiasm gone from their voices.

“Oh look,” rumbled Orr suddenly.

The thoroughfare we were working dog-legged right and then opened immediately onto a circular plaza lined with pagoda-style terracing and blocked at the far end by a multi-levelled temple supported on broadly spaced pillars. Across the open space, rain lay in broad pools where the paving had taken damage. Aside from the massive tilted wreckage of a burnt-out scorpion gun, there was no cover.

“Is that the one they killed last night?” I asked.

Lazlo shook his head. “Nah, been there for years. Besides, the way Oishii told it, last night’s never built beyond the chassis before it got fried. That one out there was a walking, talking self-prop mimint motherfucker before it died.”

Orr shot him a frowning glance.

“Better get the sprogs downstairs,” said Kiyoka.

Sylvie nodded. Over the local channel, she hurried the sweepers out of the last buildings and got them assembled behind the grav bugs. They wiped rain out of their faces and stared resentfully out across the plaza.

Sylvie stood up on the running boards at the rear of the bug and cued the coms jacket.

“Alright, listen,” she told them. “This looks pretty safe, but there’s no way to be sure, so we’re taking a new pattern. The bugs will cruise across to the far side and check the temple’s lower level. Say ten minutes. Then one bug backs up and maintains a sentry point while the other two work their way back round on either side of the plaza. When they get back to you safely, everybody comes across in a wedge and the foot sweepers go up to check the upper levels of the temple. Has everybody got that?”

Sullen wave of assent up and down the line. They couldn’t have cared less. Sylvie nodded to herself.

“Good enough. So let’s do it. Scan up.”

She twisted about on the bug and seated herself once more behind Orr.

As she leaned into him, I saw her lips move but the synth sleeve wasn’t up to hearing what she said. The murmur of the bug’s drives lifted fractionally and Orr drifted them out into the plaza. Kiyoka nudged the bug she and Lazlo were riding into a flanking position on the left and followed. I bent to my own controls and picked up the right flank.

After the relative press of the debris-choked streets, the plaza felt at once less oppressive and more exposed. The air seemed lighter, the rainsplash on the bug shield less intense. Over the open ground, the bugs actually picked up some speed. There was an illusory sensation of progress—and risk.

The Envoy conditioning, scratching for attention. Trouble, just over the perceptual horizon. Something getting ready to blow.

Hard to tell what gleanings of subconscious detail might have triggered it this time. Envoy intuitive functions are a temperamental set of faculties at the best of times, and the whole city had felt like a trap since we left the beachhead.

But you don’t dismiss that stuff.

You don’t dismiss it when it’s saved your life half a thousand times before, on worlds as far apart and different as Sharya and Adoracion.

When it’s wired into the core of who you are, deeper than the memory of your childhood.

My eyes ran a constant peripheral scan along the pagoda terracing. My right hand rested lightly on the weapons console.

Coming up on the wrecked scorpion gun.

Almost halfway.

There!

Flare of adrenalin analogue, rough through the synth system. My hand skittered on the fire control—

No.

Just the nodding flower heads on a stand of plant life sprouting up through the shattered carapace of the gun. Rain splatter knocking each flower gently down against the spring of its stalk.

My breathing eased back into action. We passed the scorpion gun and the halfway mark. The sense of impending impact stayed.

“You okay, Micky?” Sylvie’s voice in my ear.

“Yeah.” I shook my head. ”

“ ‘S nothing.”

At my back, Jadwiga’s corpse clutched me a little closer.

We made the shadows of the temple without incident. The angled stonework bulked over our heads, leading the eye upward towards huge statues of daiko drummers. Steep-leaning load-bearing support structures like drunken pillars, merging seamlessly with the fused-glass floor. Light fell in from side vents and rainwater from the roof in incessant clattering streams further back in the gloom. Orr pushed his bug inward with what seemed to me a lack of due care.

“This’ll do,” Sylvie called, voice loud enough to echo in the space we’d entered. She stood, leaned on Orr’s shoulder and twisted herself lithely to the floor beside the bug. “Make it quick, guys.”

Lazlo vaulted from the back of Kiyoka’s bug and prowled about for a while, apparently scanning the supporting structure of the temple. Orr and Kiyoka started to dismount.

“What are we—” I started, and stopped at the muffled sense of a dead comlink in my ear. I braked the bug, tugged the comset off and stared at it.

My gaze flickered to the deComs and what they were doing. “Boy! Someone want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?”

Kiyoka offered me a busy smile in passing. She was carrying a webbing belt strapped with enough demolition charges to—

“Sit tight, Micky,” she said easily. “Be done in a moment.”

“Here,” Lazlo was saying. “Here. And here. Orr?”

The giant waved a hand from the other side of the deserted space. “In hand. Maps just like you figured, Sylvie. Couple more, max.”

They were placing the charges.

I stared up at the propped and vaulted architecture.

“Oh no. Oh no, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I moved to get off and Jadwiga’s dead grip wrapped around my chest. “Sylvie!”

She looked up briefly from where she was knelt before a black satchelled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicoloured data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.

“Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ‘S all we need.”

I jerked a thumb backwards at Jadwiga. “Get this fucking thing off me, before I break it, Sylvie.”

She sighed and got up. Jadwiga let go of me and sagged. I twisted in the bug saddle and caught her before she could topple to the floor. Sylvie reached me about the same time. She nodded to herself.

“Okay. Want to be useful?”

“I want to know what the fuck this is about.”

“Later. Right now, you can take that knife I gave you back in Tekitomura and cut the stack out of Jad’s spine for me. Seems to be a core skill for you, and I don’t know that any of the rest of us want the duty.”

I looked down at the dead woman in my arms. She’d flopped face down and the sunlenses had slipped. One dead eye caught the faint light.

“Now you want to do the excision?”

“Yes, now.” Her eyes swivelled up to check a retinal display. We were on a clock. “In the next three minutes, because that’s about all we have.”

“All done this side,” called Orr.

I climbed off the bug and lowered Jadwiga to the fused-glass. The knife came to my hand as if it belonged there. I cut through the corpse’s clothing at the nape and peeled the layers back to reveal the pale flesh beneath. Then switched on the blade.

Across the temple floor, the others looked up involuntarily at the sound.

I stared back, and they looked away.

Under my hands, the top of Jad’s spine came out with a pair of deft slices and a brief levering motion. The smell that came with it wasn’t pleasant. I wiped the knife on her clothing and stowed it, examined the tissue-clogged vertebrae as I straightened up. Orr reached me with long strides and held out his hand.

“I’ll take that.”

I shrugged. “My pleasure. Here.”

“We’re all set.” Back at the satchel unit, Sylvie folded something closed with a gesture that reeked of finality. She stood up. “Ki, you want to do the honours?”

Kiyoka came and stood beside me, looking down at Jad’s mutilated corpse. There was a smooth grey egg in her hand. For what seemed like a long time, we all stood there in silence.

“Running short, Ki,” Lazlo said quietly.

Very gently, Kiyoka knelt at Jadwiga’s head and placed the grenade in the space I’d cut in her nape. As she got up again, something moved in her face.

Orr touched her gently on the arm.

“Be good as new,” he told her.

I looked at Sylvie. “So you guys want to share your plans now?”

“Sure.” The command head nodded at the satchel. “Escape clause. Datamine there blows in a couple of minutes, blips everybody’s comms and scanners out. Couple of minutes more, the noisy stuff goes up. Bits of Jad everywhere, then the house comes down. And we’re gone. Out the back door. Shielded drives, we can ride out the EMP pulse and by the time the sprogs get their scanners back on line we’ll be peripheral, invisible. They’ll find enough of Jad to make it look like we tripped a karakuri nest or a smart bomb and got vaporised in the blast. Leaving us free agents once more. Just the way we like it.”

I shook my head. “That is the worst fucking plan I have ever heard. What if—”

“Hey.” Orr gave me an unfriendly stare. “You don’t like it, you can fucking stay here.”

“Skipper,” Lazlo again, an edge in his voice this time. “Maybe instead of talking about this, we could just do it, you know? In the next two minutes? What do you reckon?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka glanced at Jadwiga’s sprawled corpse and then away.

“Let’s get out of here. Now.”

Sylvie nodded. The Slipins mounted up and we cruised in formation towards the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.

No one looked back.

EIGHT

As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.

We were a good five hundred metres the other side of the temple when it blew. There was a muffled series of detonations, and then a rumbling that built to a roar. I twisted in my seat—with Jadwiga now in Orr’s pocket instead of riding pillion, the view was unobstructed—and in the narrow frame of the street we had taken I saw the whole structure slump undramatically to the ground amidst a boiling cloud of dust. A minute later, an underpass took us below street level and I lost even that fractional view.

I rode level with the other two bugs

“You had this all mapped out?” I asked. “All the time, you knew this was what you were going to do?”

Sylvie nodded gravely in the dim light of the tunnel. Unlike the temple, here the effect was unintended. Decayed illuminum panelling overhead cast a last-gasp bluish glow over everything but it was less than you’d get on a triple-moon night with clear sky. Navigation lights sprang up on the bugs in response. The underpass angled right and we lost the wash of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel behind us. The air started to turn chilly.

“Been through here half a hundred times before,” drawled Orr. “That temple’s been a bolthole dream every time. Just we never had anyone to run away from before.”

“Yeah, well thanks for sharing.”

A ripple of deCom mirth in the blue gloom.

“Thing is,” Lazlo said. “Couldn’t really let you in on the loop without real-time auditory communication, and that’s clumsy. The skip clued us and cued us in about fifteen seconds through the crew net. You we would have had to tell, you know, with words. And the amount of state-of-the-art coms gear floating around the beachhead, no way to know who’s listening in.”

“We had no choice,” said Kiyoka.

“No choice,” echoed Sylvie. “Bodies burnt, and screaming skies and they tell me, I tell myself—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, guys. Fucking slippage again. Really got to get this sorted when we’re back south.”

I nodded back the way we’d come. “So how long before those guys get their scan systems back up?”

The deComs looked at each other. Sylvie shrugged.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, depends what failsafe software they had.”

“Too bad if the karakuri show up in the meantime, huh?”

Kiyoka snorted. Lazlo raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, that’s right,” rumbled Orr. “It’s too bad. Life in New Hok, better get used to it.”

“Anyway, look.” Kiyoka, patiently reasonable. “There are no bloody karakuri in Drava. They wouldn’t—”

Metallic flailing, up ahead.

Another taut exchange of glances. The weapons consoles on all three bugs lit across, tugged to readiness, presumably by Sylvie’s command-head override, and the little convoy jolted to a halt. Orr straightened up in his seat.

Ahead of us, an abandoned vehicle hulked in the gloom. No sign of movement. The frantic clashing sounds bounced past it from somewhere beyond the next bend in the tunnel.

Lazlo grinned tightly in the low light. “What were you saying, Ki?”

“Hey,” she said weakly. “I’m open to contrary evidence.”

The nailing stopped. Repeated.

“The fuck is that?” murmured Orr.

Sylvie’s face was unreadable. “Whatever it is, the datamine should have got it. Las, you want to start earning your wincefish pay?”

“Sure.” Lazlo winked at me and swung off his seat behind Kiyoka. He laced his fingers and pushed them outward until the knuckles cracked “You powered up there, big man?”

Orr nodded, already dismounting. He cracked the bug’s running-board storage space and dragged out a half-metre wrecking bar. Lazlo grinned again.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and stand well back. Scan up.”

And he was gone, loping along the curved wall of the tunnel, hugging the cover it offered until he reached the wrecked vehicle, then flitting sideways, seeming in the dim light to have no more substance than the shadow he cast. Orr stalked after him, a brutal apeman figure with the wrecking bar held low in his left hand. I glanced back to the bug where Sylvie sat crouched forward, eyes hooded, face blanked in the curious mix of intent and absent that signalled net engagement.

It was poetry to watch.

Lazlo grabbed part of the wreckage with one hand and hauled himself, monkey casual, up onto the vehicle’s roof. He froze into immobility, head cocked slightly. Orr hung back at the curve. Sylvie muttered inaudibly to herself, and Lazlo moved. A single leap, straight back to the floor of the tunnel and he landed running. Diagonally, across the curve towards something I couldn’t see. Orr stepped across, arms spread for balance, upper body held rigid facing the way the wincefish had gone. Another split second, a half-dozen rapid, deliberate steps forward and then he too was out of line of sight.

Seconds decayed. We sat and waited in the blue gloom.

Seconds decayed.

And—

“…so what the fuck is …?”

Sylvie’s voice, puzzled. Sliding up in volume as she emerged from the link-up and gave her real-world senses dominance again. She blinked a couple of times and looked sideways at Kiyoka.

The slight woman shrugged. Only now, I realised she’d been part of it, tuned into the ballet I’d just watched at standby, her body slightly stiff in the saddle of the bug while her eyes rode with the rest of the crew on Lazlo’s shoulder.

“Fucked if I know, Sylvie.”

“Alright.” The command head’s gaze turned on me. “Seems safe. Come on, let’s go have a look.”

We rode the bugs cautiously up around the bend in the tunnel and dismounted to stare at what Lazlo and Orr had found.

The kneeling figure in the tunnel was only humanoid in the vaguest terms. There was a head, mounted on the main chassis, but the only reason it bore resemblance to a man was that something had ripped the casing apart and left a more delicate structure beneath partially exposed. At the uppermost point, a wide bracing ring had survived, halo-like, to hover on a skeletal framework over the rest of the head.

It had limbs too, in approximately the positions you’d expect on a human being, but enough of them to suggest insect rather than mammalian life. On one side of the main body mass, two of the available four arms were inert, hanging limp and in one case scorched and shredded to scrap. On the other side, one limb had been torn entirely off, with massive damage to the surrounding body casing, and two more were clearly beyond useful function. They kept trying to flex but at every attempt, sparks ripped savagely across the exposed circuitry until the movement spasmed and froze. The flaring light threw spastic shadows on the walls.

It wasn’t clear if the thing’s four lower limbs were functional or not, but it didn’t try to get up as we approached. The three functioning arms merely redoubled their efforts to achieve something indefinable in the guts of the metal dragon laid out on the tunnel floor.

The machine had four powerful-looking side-mounted legs ending in clawed feet, a long, angular head full of multibarrelled ancillary weaponry, and a spiked tail that would gouge into the ground to give added stability.

It even had wings—a webbed framework of upward-curving launch cradles designed to take the primary missile load.

It was dead.

Something had torn huge parallel gashes in the left flank and the legs below the damage had collapsed. The launch cradles were twisted out of alignment and the head was wrenched to one side.

“Komodo launcher,” said Lazlo, skirting the tableau warily. “And karakuri caretaker unit. You lose, Ki.”

Kiyoka shook her head. “Doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s it doing down here? What’s it fucking doing, come to that?”

The karakuri cocked its head at her. Its functional limbs crept out of the gash in the dragon’s body and hovered over the damage in a gesture that looked weirdly protective.

“Repairs?” I suggested.

Orr barked a laugh. “Yeah. Karakuri are caretakers to a point. After that, they turn scavenger. Something this badly hit, they’d dismember it for a co-op cluster to make into something new. Not try and repair it.”

“And that’s another thing.” Kiyoka gestured around. “The mech puppets don’t get out that much on their own. Where’s the rest of them? Sylvie, you’re getting nothing, right?”

“Nothing.” The command head looked up and down the tunnel pensively.

Blue light glinted off strands of silver in her hair. “This is all there is.”

Orr hefted his wrecking bar. “So we going to switch it off or what?”

“Worth fuck-all bounty anyway,” grumbled Kiyoka. “Even if we could claim it, which we can’t. Why not just leave it for the sprogs to find?”

“I am not,” said Lazlo, “walking the rest of this tunnel with that thing still on ops behind me. Turn it off, big man.”

Orr looked questioningly at Sylvie. She shrugged and nodded.

The wrecking bar swung. Inhumanly swift, into the eggshell remnants of the karakuri’s head. Metal grated and tore. The halo ripped loose, bounced on the tunnel floor and rolled away into the shadows. Orr pulled the bar clear and swung again. One of the machine’s arms came up, fending—the bar flattened it into the ruins of the head. Eerily silent, the karakuri struggled to rise on lower limbs that I now saw were irretrievably mangled. Orr grunted, lifted one booted foot and stomped down hard.

The machine went over, thrashing at the damp tunnel air. The giant moved in, wielding the bar with the economical savagery of experience.

It took a while.

When he was done, when the sparks had bled dry amidst the wreckage at his feet, Orr straightened and wiped his brow. He was breathing hard.

He glanced at Sylvie again.

“That do?”

“Yeah, it’s off.” She went back to the bug they were sharing. “Come on, we’d better get cracking.”

As we all mounted up again, Orr caught me watching him. He flexed his brows good-naturedly at me and puffed out his cheeks.

“Hate it when you’ve got to do them by hand,” he said. “Specially after just paying out all that cred on new blaster upgrades.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s tough.”

“Ah, be better when we hit the Uncleared, you’ll see. Plenty of room to deploy the hardware, no need to hide the splash. Still.” He pointed at me with the wrecking bar. “If we do have to do another by hand, you’re aboard now. You can turn off the next one.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, no big deal.” He handed the bar back over his shoulder to Sylvie, who stowed it. The bug quivered under his hands and drifted forward, past the wreckage of the fallen karakuri. The flexed brows again, and a grin.

“Welcome to deCom, Micky.”