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.
“All right, 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 backward with one arm and stopped her. Flinched as pain sparkled through the soft woolen gray 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 were 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 motorized crew has a street to itself. The rest of you can follow who you like but I’d advise no less than half a dozen in each search line. Motorized 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, motorized 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 meters 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-meter 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. Every-one’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 kilometers into the city and operational tension had given way to boredom. The nearest crews were half a 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 doglegged right and then opened immediately onto a circular plaza lined with pagoda-style terracing and blocked at the far end by a multileveled 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 tilt
ed wreckage of a burned-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.
“All right, 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 around 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 adrenaline analog, 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 toward 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 farther 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. “Hoy! 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 knelt before a black satcheled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicolored data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.
“Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ’S all we need.”
I jerked a thumb backward 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 facedown, and the sunlenses had slipped. One dead eye caught the faint light.
“Now you want to do the excision?”
“Yes, now.” Her eyes swiveled 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 honors?”
Kiyoka came and stood beside me, looking down at Jad’s mutilated corpse. There was a smooth gray 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 coms 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 and by the time the sprogs get their scanners back online 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 vaporized 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 toward the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.
No one looked back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.
We were a good five hundred meters 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 amid 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 paneling 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.