“Watch that drift,” said Vlad to his helmsman. There was a curious new tone to his voice, an authority I hadn’t seen before, and the worst of his twitchiness seemed to have damped down. “We’re riding the wind here, not giving in to it. Lean on her.”
“Leaning.”
The hoverloader quivered palpably with the maneuver. The deck thrummed underfoot. Rain made a new, furious sound on the roof and viewports as our angle of entry to the storm shifted.
“That’s it,” Vlad said serenely. “Hold her like that.”
I stayed on the bridge for a while longer, then nodded at Murakami and slipped down the companionway to the cabin decks. I moved aft, hands braced on the corridor walls to beat the occasional lurches in the hover-loader’s stability. Once or twice, crew members appeared and slid past me in the cramped space with practiced ease. The air was hot and sticky. A couple of cabins along, I glanced sideways at an opened door and saw one of Vlad’s young pirates, stripped to the waist and bent over unfamiliar modules of hardware on the floor. I took in large, well-shaped breasts, the sheen of sweat on her flesh under harsh white light, short-cut hair damp on the nape of her neck. Then she realized I was there and straightened up. She braced herself with one hand on the cabin wall, folded the other arm across her breasts, and met my eyes with a tense glare that I guessed was either meth comedown or combat nerves.
“Got a problem, sam?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, mind was on something else.”
“Yeah? Well, fuck off.”
The cabin door sliced shut. I sighed.
Fair enough.
I found Jad looking similarly tense, but fully dressed. She was seated on the upper of the twin bunks in the cabin we’d been allocated, shard blaster stripped of its magazine and laid under the arch of one booted leg. In her hands were the gleaming halves of a solid-load pistol that I didn’t remember her having before.
I swung into the lower bunk.
“What you got there?”
“Kalashnikov electromag,” she said. “One of the guys down the corridor loaned it to me.”
“Making friends already, huh?” An unaccountable sadness hit me as I spoke the words. Maybe something to do with the twin-sibling pheromones coming off the Eishundo sleeves. “Wonder where he stole it from.”
“Who says it had to be stolen?”
“I do. These guys are pirates.” I stuck a hand up to her bunk. “Come on, let me have a look at it.”
She snapped the weapon back together and dropped it into my palm. I held it in front of my eyes and nodded. The Kal EM range were famed throughout the Settled Worlds as the silent sidearm of choice, and this was a state-of-the-art model. I grunted and handed it back up.
“Yeah. Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No methhead pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun. He nicked it. Probably killed the owner, too. Got to watch the company you keep, Jad.”
“Man, you’re cheerful this morning. Didn’t you get any sleep?”
“The way you were snoring up there? What do you think?”
No reply. I grunted again and drifted into the memories Murakami had stirred up. Kasengo, undistinguished little port town in the barely settled southern hemisphere of Nkrumah’s Land, recently garrisoned with government troops as the political climate worsened and relations with the Protectorate deteriorated. Kasengo, for reasons best known to the locals, had stellar-range hypercast capacity, and the government of Nkrumah’s Land were worried that the UN military might like access to that capacity.
They were right to worry.
We’d come in quietly at hypercast stations around the globe over the previous six months, while everyone was still pretending that diplomacy was a viable option. By the time Envoy Command ordered the strike on Kasengo, we were as adjusted to Nkrumah’s Land as any of its hundred million fifth-generation colonists. While our deep-cover teams fomented riots on the streets of cities in the north, Murakami and I gathered a small tactical squad and disappeared south. The idea was to eliminate the garrison while they slept and seize the needlecast facilities the following morning. Something went wrong, information leaked, and we arrived to find the hypercast station heavily defended.
There was no time to draw fresh plans. The same leak that had alerted the Kasengo garrison meant that reinforcements would be on their way. In the midst of a freezing rainstorm, we hit the station in stealth suits and grav packs, sewing the sky around us with tinsel to simulate massive numbers. In the confusion of the storm, the ruse worked like a dream. The garrison were largely conscripted youngsters with a few seasoned NCOs riding herd. Ten minutes into the firefight, they broke and scattered through the rain-slashed streets in frantic, retreating knots. We chased, isolated, mopped them up. Some few went down fighting; most were taken alive and locked up.
Later, we used their bodies to sleeve the first wave of Envoy heavy assault.
I closed my eyes.
“Micky?” Jad’s voice from the bunk above.
“Takeshi.”
“Whatever. Let’s stick with Micky, huh?”
“All right.”
“You think that fuck Anton’s going to be there today?”
I levered my eyes open again. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Tanaseda seemed to think so. Looks like Kovacs is still using him anyway, maybe as a safeguard. If no one’s sure what to expect from Sylvie or the thing she’s carrying, might be comforting to have another command head around.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” She paused. Then, just as my eyes were sliding closed once more, “It doesn’t bother you, talking about yourself that way? Knowing he’s out there?”
“Of course it bothers me.” I yawned cavernously. “I’m going to kill the little fuck.”
Silence. I let my eyelids shutter themselves.
“So, Micky.”
“What?”
“If Anton is there?”
I rolled my eyes at the bunk above me. “Yes?”
“If he’s there, I want that motherfucker. You have to shoot him, you wreck his legs or something. He’s mine.”
“Fine.”
“I mean it, Micky.”
“So do I,” I mumbled, tilting ponderously away under the weight of deferred sleep. “Kill whoever you fucking like, Jad.”
• • •
Kill whoever you fucking like.
It could have been a mission statement for the raid.
We hit the farm at ramming speed. Garbled distress broadcasts got us close enough that any long-range weaponry Segesvar had would be useless. Vlad’s helmsman ran a vector that looked like driven-before-the-storm but was actually a high-speed controlled swerve. By the time the haiduci realized what was going on, Impaler was upon them. She smashed in through the panther pens, crushing webbing barriers and the old wooden jetties of the original baling station, unstoppable, ripping loose the planking, demolishing decayed antique walls, carrying the growing mass of piled-up wreckage forward on her armored nose.
Look, I told Murakami and Vlad the night before, there is no subtle way to do this. And Vlad’s eyes lit up with meth-fired enthusiasm.
Impaler plowed to a clanking, grinding halt amid the half-submerged wet-bunker modules. Her decks were canted steeply to the right, and down on the debarkation level a dozen collision alerts shrilled hysterically in my ears as the hatches on that side blew wide open on explosive bolts. Boarding ramps dropped like bombs, livewire security lines at their tips, writhing and shredding into evercrete for purchase. Dully through the hull, I heard the clang and whir of the major grapple lines firing. Impaler caught and clung fast.
It was a system once designed only for emergency use, but the pirates had rewired every aspect of their vessel for fast assault, boarding, and battery. Only the machine mind that ran it all had been left out of the loop, and still thought we were a ship in crisis.
The weather met us on the ramp. Rain and wind rushed me, slapped at my face, shoved at me from odd angles. Vlad’s assault team ran be
llowing into the midst of it. I glanced once at Murakami, shook my head, and then followed. Maybe they had the right idea—with Impaler snagged fast amid the damage she’d just created, there was no way back for anybody that didn’t involve either winning or dying.
Gunfire started in the gray swirl of the storm. Hiss-sizzle of beam weapons, the boom and bark of slug guns. The beams showed pale blue and yellow in the murk. A distant ripple of thunder across the sky; pale lightning seemed to respond. Someone screamed and fell somewhere up ahead. Indistinct yelling. I cleared the end of the ramp, skidded on the bulge of a wet-bunker module, gained balance with the Eishundo sleeve, and leapt forward. Down into the shallow slosh of water between modules, up the bubbled slope of the next. The surface was gritty and gave good purchase. Peripheral vision told me I was the apex of a wedge, Jad on my left flank, Murakami on my right with a plasmafrag gun.
I cranked the neurachem and spotted a maintenance ladder ahead, three of Vlad’s pirates pinned down at the base by gunfire from the dockside above. The sprawled body of a comrade floated against the nearest wet-bunker module, still steaming from face and chest where the blaster fire had scorched the life from its owner.
I flung myself toward the ladder with wincefish abandon.
“Jad!”
“Yeah—go!”
Like being back in the Uncleared. Vestiges of Slipin attunement, maybe some twin-like affinity, care of Eishundo. I sprinted flat-out. Behind me the shard blaster spoke—spiteful rushing whine in the rain—and the edge of the dock exploded in a hail of fragments. More screams. I reached the ladder about the same moment the pirates realized they were no longer pinned down. Stamped my way hurriedly up it, Rapsodia stowed.
At the top, there were bodies, torn and bloodied from the shard fire, and one of Segesvar’s men, injured but still on his feet. He spat and lurched at me with a knife. I twisted aside, locked out the knife arm, and threw him off the dock. Short scream, lost in the storm.
Crouch and search, Rapsodia out and sweeping in the poor visibility, while the others came up behind me. Rain smashed down and made a million little geysers back off the evercrete surface. I blinked it out of my eyes.
The dock was clear.
Murakami clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, not bad for a retired man.”
I snorted. “Someone’s got to show you how. Come on, this way.”
We stalked along the dock in the rain, found the entrance I wanted, and slipped inside, one at a time. The sudden relief from the force of the storm was shocking, almost like silence. We stood dripping water on the plastic floor of a short corridor set with familiar, heavy, portholed metal doors. Thunder growled outside. I peered through the glass of a door just to be sure, and saw a room of blank-faced metal cabinets. Cold storage for the panther feed and, occasionally, the corpses of Segesvar’s enemies. At the end of the corridor, a narrow stairwell led down to the crude resleeving unit and veterinary section for the panthers.
I nodded to the stairs.
“Down there. Three levels and we’re in the wet-bunker complex.”
The pirates went in the van, noisy and enthusiastic. Meth-wired as they were, and not a little pissed off with having to follow me up the ladder, it would have been hard to dissuade them. Murakami shrugged and didn’t try. They clattered down the stairwell at speed, and ran straight into an ambush at the bottom.
We were a flight of stairs behind, moving with undrugged caution, and even there I felt the splashback from the blasters scorch my face and hands. Cacophony of high, sudden shrieks as the pirates caught fire and died as human torches. One of them made three blundering steps back up out of the inferno, flame-winged arms raised imploringly toward us. His melted face was less than a meter from mine when he collapsed, hissing and smoking, on the cold steel stairs below.
Murakami hurled an ultravibe grenade down the well, and it bounced once metallically before the familiar chittering scream kicked in. In the confined space it was deafening. We slapped palms to ears in unison. If anybody down there screamed when it killed them, their deaths were inaudible.
We waited for a second after the grenade died, then Murakami fired the plasmafrag rifle downward. There was no reaction. I crept down past the blackened, cooling corpses of the pirates, gagging at the stench. Peered past the inward-curled, despairing limbs of the one who’d met the brunt of the fire, and saw an empty corridor. Yellow-cream walls, floor, and ceiling, brilliantly lit with overhead strips of inlaid illuminum. Close to the foot of the stairwell, everything was painted with broad swathes of blood and clotted tissue.
“Clear.”
We picked our way through the gore and moved cautiously up the corridor, into the heart of the wet bunker’s base levels. Tanaseda hadn’t known where exactly the captives would be held—the haiduci were twitchy and aggressive about allowing the yakuza a presence in Kossuth in the first place. Precarious in his new role of penitent failed blackmailer, Tanaseda had still insisted, on his own admission because he’d hoped to retrieve the whereabouts of Yukio Hirayasu’s stack from me by torture or extortion and thus cut his loss of face, at least among his own colleagues. Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka, for some byzantine reason or other, agreed, and in the end it was her pressure on Segesvar that forged the diplomatic cooperation between yakuza and haiduci. Tanaseda had been welcomed formally by Segesvar himself, and then been told in no uncertain terms that he’d best find himself accommodation in Newpest or Sourcetown, stay away from the farm unless specifically summoned, and keep his men on a tight leash. He’d certainly not been given a tour of the premises.
But really, there was only one secure place in the complex for people you didn’t want dead yet. I’d seen it a couple of times on previous visits, had once even watched some doomed gambling junkie conveyed there while Segesvar thought about how exactly to make an example of him. If you wanted to lock a man up on the farm, you put him where even a monster couldn’t break free. You locked him in the panther cells.
We paused at a crossways, where ventilation systems gaped open above us. Faintly, down the conduits, came the sounds of ongoing battle. I gestured left, murmuring.
“Down there. The panther cells are all on the right at the next turn; they open onto tunnels that lead directly into the pens. Segesvar converted a couple of them for human holding. Got to be one of those.”
“All right then.”
We picked up the pace again, took the right turn, and then I heard the smooth, solid hum of one of the doors on the cells sliding down into the floor. Footsteps and urgent voices beyond. Segesvar and Aiura, and a third voice I’d heard before but couldn’t place. I clamped down on the savage spurt of joy, flattened myself to the wall, and waved Jad and Murakami back.
Aiura, compressed rage as I tuned in.
“. . . really expect me to be impressed by this?”
“Don’t you hand me that shit,” snapped Segesvar. “This is that slant-eyed yak fuck you insisted on bringing aboard. I told you—”
“Somehow, Segesvar-san, I do not think—”
“And don’t fucking call me that, either. This is Kossuth, not the fucking north. Have a bit of cultural sensitivity, why don’t you. Anton, you sure there’s no intrusion ’cast going down?”
And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.
“Nothing. This is strictly—”
I should have seen it coming.
I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—
Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.
“Anton, you motherless fuck!”
I came off the wall, spinning to cover them all with the Rapsodia.
Too late.
I took in a glimpse of the three of them, gaping in shock. Segesvar met my eyes and flinched. Jad stood braced, shard gun ri
ding her hip, leveled. Anton saw and reacted, deCom swift. He seized Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka by the shoulders and hurled her in front of him. The shard gun coughed. The Harlan security exec screa—
—and came apart from shoulders to waist as the monomol swarm ripped through her. Blood and tissue exploded through the air around us, splattered me, blinded me—
In the time it took me to wipe my eyes, they were both gone. Back through the cell they’d come out of, and the tunnel beyond. What remained of Aiura lay on the floor in three pieces and puddles of gore.
“Jad, what the fuck are you playing at?” I yelled.
She wiped her face, smearing blood. “Told you I’d get him.”
I grabbed at calm. Stabbed a finger at the carnage around our feet. “You didn’t get him, Jad. He’s gone.” Calm failed me, collapsed catastrophically before focusless fury. “How could you be so fucking stupid. He’s fucking gone.”
“Then I’ll fucking catch him up.”
“No, we nee—”
But she was already moving again, across the opened cell at a fast deCom lope. Ducking into the tunnel.
“Nice going, Tak,” said Murakami sardonically. “Command presence. I like that.”
“Shut up, Tod. Just find the monitor room, check the cells. They’re all around here somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I was backing off, moving before I finished speaking. Sprinting again, after Jad, after Segesvar.
After something.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The tunnel came out in a fight pit. Steep, sloping evercrete sides, ten meters tall and torn ragged for half their height by decades of swamp panthers trying to claw their way out. Railed spectator space around the top, all open to a sky clogged with a fast-moving stampede of greenish cloud cover. It was impossible to look directly up in the rain. Thirty centimeters of thick mud in the bottom of the pit, now pounded into brown sludge by the downpour. The drainage vents in the walls couldn’t keep up.
I squinted through the water in the air and on my face, spotted Jad halfway up the narrow maintenance ladder cut into one corner of the pit. Bawled at her over the sound of the storm.
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