“Been through here half a hundred times before,” drawled Orr. “That temple’s been a bolt-hole 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 burned, 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 fail-safe 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 flailing stopped. Repeated.
“The fuck is that?” murmured Orr.
Sylvie’s face was unreadable. “Whatever it is, the datamine should have gotten 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-meter wrecking bar. Lazlo grinned again.
“Then, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts 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 signaled 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 toward 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, half a 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 linkup 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 realized 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.”
“All right.” 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 multibarrel 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 l
oose, 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 amid 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.”
PART TWO
THIS IS
SOMEONE ELSE
Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves
And burn your fingers once again
BAY CITY GRAFFITO
On a bench outside the
Central Penal Storage Facility
CHAPTER NINE
Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.
“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”
I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang. A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok gray, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty meters below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.
“Leave us alone,” it repeated. “And we’ll do you the same favor.”
“Can’t do that.” Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew linkup at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. “You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.”
“Yeah.” Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. “And besides which, we want the fucking land.”
“The essence of empowerment,” said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, “is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonweal economic constitution . . .”
“You are the aggressors here.” The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. “We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.”
Kiyoka snorted. “Oh come off it.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” rumbled Orr.
It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we’d crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge. Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.
So, after a fashion, had I.
“. . . those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic . . .”
Drone’s the right fucking word.
I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards—there was, for example, no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves—but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.
“. . . in a struggle that has surfaced again and again everyplace the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—”
Movement.
Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength—Sylvie had estimated the co-op’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.
“Then you leave me no choice,” it said. “I shall be forced to neutralize your incursion with immediate effect.”
“Yeah,” said Lazlo through a yawn. “You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.”
“I am already about it.”
Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley toward us, heatseeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted. The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-meter drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.
Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.
It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared. Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve—Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were—came equipped with geckogene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could—assuming I actually fucking wanted to—scramble up a hundred meters of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene-engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain. Jadwiga, resleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an earsplitting whoop as she discovered the genetech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.
Personally, I don’t like heights.
On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to
the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.
I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised, but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew. Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security-scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it—they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographics and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.
The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked-up vision. Still a kilometer off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line-of-sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earned the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.
I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig. “Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.”
“Take it easy, Micky,” she drawled back. “I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation, either. Programmed parameters. Remember that?”
A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background. On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.
Sylvie sighed. “So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement? All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armor, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November Seventeenth Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?”