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  I walked in, firing.

  The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometer precision.

  Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

  I emptied both guns.

  They spat out their magazines and gaped open eagerly. I pounded the butts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun butts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

  The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chef’s knife.

  I emptied again.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

  I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank’s head looking up at me.

  It had fallen faceup on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide-open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she were going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

  The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

  I dropped my arms.

  The bar.

  My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me.

  In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side.

  “Get me a corrosion grenade,” I said, and my voice was unrecognizable in my own ears.

  • • •

  The Nagini hovered three meters above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

  The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the Nagini’s holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand’s insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

  The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor panels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of—

  Stop that.

  Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

  Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half a dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation-and-deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser-sealed at the neck, and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human-shaped.

  Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalized anything nonorganic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank’s weapons, either.

  I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

  On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping’s microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

  “Take a look.” Sun glanced around at me and cleared her throat. “It’s what you said.”

  “Then I don’t need to look.”

  “You’re saying these are the nanobes?” asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. “Not—”

  “The gate isn’t even fucking open, Sutjiadi.” I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

  Sun peered again into the microscope’s screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.

  “It’s an interlocking configuration,” she said. “But the components don’t actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It’s like a, I don’t know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nanobe generates a portion of the field, and that’s what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just passes through it. It might vaporize a few individual nanobes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that’s not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing’s organic.”

  Hand looked down at me curiously. “You knew this?”

  I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.

  I made an effort to hold it down.

  “I worked it out. In the firefight.” I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me, too. “Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don’t work, because we’ve already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They’ve evolved to beat it, and now they’ve got conferred immunity to beam weapons.”

  “And the ultravibe?” Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.

  She shook her head. “I’ve passed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nanobes resonate inside the field, but it doesn’t damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam.”

  “Solid ammunition’s the only thing that works,” Hand said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, and not for much longer.” I got up to leave. “Give them some time, they’ll evolve past that, too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later.”

  “Where are you going, Kovacs?”

  “If I were you, Hand, I’d get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they’re likely to start growing longer arms.”

  I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch from his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank’s Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three meters below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.

  I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.

  Cruickshank flickered through my head. Grinning, focused on a task, smoking, in the throes of orgasm, shredded into the sky—

  Stop that.

  I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.

  “Kovacs.” He crouched to my level and started again. “Kovacs, I am sorry. She
was a fine sol—”

  The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backward with the shock.

  “Shut up, Jiang.” I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. “You say one more fucking word and I’ll paint Luc with your brains.”

  I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung on to it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.

  One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE

  Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There’d been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.

  From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn’t muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.

  Did I not tell you there was work for me here?

  I closed my eyes.

  Where is my antipersonnel round, Wedge Wolf? Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it?

  I don’t—

  Are you looking for me now?

  I don’t do that shit no more.

  Laughter, like the gravel of cortical stacks pouring from a scoop.

  “Kovacs?”

  I looked up. It was Luc Deprez.

  “I think you had better come upstairs,” he said.

  Over our heads, the noise seemed to have quieted down.

  • • •

  “We are not,” Hand said quietly, looking around the cabin, “I repeat, not leaving here without staking a Mandrake claim on the other side of that gate. Read the terms of your contracts. The phrasing every available avenue of opportunity is paramount and omnipresent. Whatever Captain Sutjiadi orders you to do now, you will be executed and returned to the soul dumps if we leave without exploring those avenues. Am I making myself clear?”

  “No, you’re not,” shouted Ameli Vongsavath through the connecting hatch from the cockpit. “Because the only avenue I can see is carrying a fucked marker buoy up the beach by hand and trying to throw it bodily through the gate on the off chance it might still work. That doesn’t sound to me like an opportunity for anything except suicide. These things take your stack.”

  “We can scan for the nanobes—” But angry voices trampled Hand down. He raised his hands over his head in exasperation. Sutjiadi snapped for quiet, and got it.

  “We are soldiers.” Jiang spoke unexpectedly into the sudden lull. “Not Kempist conscripts. This is not a fighting chance.”

  He looked around, seeming to have surprised himself as much as anyone else.

  “When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,” Hand said, “you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That’s what I’m buying from you now.”

  Jiang looked at him with open disdain. “I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.”

  “Oh, Damballah.” Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. “What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think paid for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for me. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.”

  “Hand.” I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the center of the cabin. “I think your sales technique’s flagging. Why don’t you give it a rest?”

  “Kovacs, I am not—”

  “Sit down.” The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.

  Faces turned expectantly in my direction.

  Not this again.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We can’t. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can’t. Not until we’ve placed the buoy.”

  I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.

  I turned to Hand.

  “Why don’t you tell them who deployed the OPERN System? Tell them why.”

  He just looked at me.

  “All right. I’ll tell them.” I looked around at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. “Our sponsor here has a few homegrown enemies back in Landfall who’d quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn’t. So far that hasn’t worked, but back in Landfall they don’t know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we’ll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?”

  Hand nodded.

  “And the Wedge code?” asked Sutjiadi. “That counts for nothing?”

  More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.

  “What Wedge co—”

  “Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—”

  “How come we didn’t—”

  “Shut up, all of you.” To my amazement, they did. “Wedge Command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren’t made aware of it because”—I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab—“you didn’t need to know. You didn’t matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?”

  He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.

  “Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,” he said with the measure of a lecturer. “Whoever deployed the OPERN System nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same channels will provide them with the authorization codes Isaac Carrera operates under. The Wedge are the most likely candidates to shoot us down.”

  Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. “You’re Wedge, Kovacs. I don’t believe they will murder one of their own. They’re not known for it.”

  I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand’s enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It’ll short-circuit any influence I have.”

  “You could not bluff? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.”

  I nodded. “I might try that. But the odds aren’t good, and there is an easier way.”

  That cut across the low babble of dispute.

  Deprez inclined his head. “And that is?”

  “The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we’re home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we’ve found, Hand’s pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we’re dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.”

  It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all fucking looking at me.

  Please, not this again.

  “The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate, and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.”

  The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They’d come around. They’d come around because they’d see what Hand and I already knew. They’d see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn’t see it that way—

  I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.

  Anyone who didn’t see it that way, I’d shoot.

  • • •

  For someone whose specialty was machin
e systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the Nagini up to less than fifty meters off the cave entrance. With the forward reentry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.

  It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun’s cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.

  It was a sound like the world splintering apart.

  I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn’t space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn’t feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disconnected at the images, rock changing color with shocking vividness as it crazed and shattered under pressures of plate tectonic magnitude, then the rushing collapse of the shards as they hurried downward, turned to dense clouds of powder before they could escape the ultravibe beams probing back and forth in the debris. I could feel a vague discomfort in the pit of my stomach from the backwash. Sun was firing on low intensity, and shielding in the weapons pod kept the worst of the ultravibe blast damped down aboard the Nagini. But still the shrill scream of the beam and the pittering screeches of the tortured rock clawed their way in through the two open hatches and screwed into my ears like surgery.

  I kept seeing Cruickshank die.

  Twenty-three minutes.

  The ultravibe shut down.