“Well, yeah, for anyone walking their dog in Harlan Park, it would have been.”
“I’m serious, Tod. If this storm does come in and your methed-out pal Vlad can’t handle his helm, we’re likely to find ourselves upside down and trying to breathe belaweed before we get anywhere near Segesvar’s place.”
Murakami frowned a little.
“Let me worry about Vlad,” he said. “You just concentrate on building us an assault plan that works.”
I nodded.
“Right. An assault plan that works on the premier
haiduci
stronghold in the southern hemisphere, using teenage junkies for shock troops and a hookback storm for landing cover. By dawn. Sure. How hard can it be?”
The frown again for a moment, then suddenly he laughed.
“Now you put it like that, I can hardly wait.” He clapped me on the shoulder and wandered off toward the pirate hoverloader, voice trailing back to me. “I’ll go talk to Vlad now. Going to be one for the annals, Tak. You’ll see. I’ve got a feeling about it. Envoy intuition.”
“Right.”
And out at the horizon, thunder rolled back and forth as if trapped in the narrow space between the cloud base and the ground.
Ebisu, back for his trident, and not much liking what he’d just heard.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Dawn was still little more than a rinsed-out gray splash thrown over the looming black mass of the storm front when
Impaler
cast off her moorings and blasted out across the Expanse. At assault speed, she made a noise as if she were shaking herself to pieces, but as we headed into the storm even that faded before the shriek of the wind and the metallic drumming of rain on her armored flanks. The forward viewports of the bridge were a shattering mass of water through which heavy-duty wipers flogged with an overworked electronic whining. Dimly, you could see the normally sluggish waters of the Expanse whipped into waves. Ebisu’s Eavesdrop had delivered to expectations.
“Like Kasengo all over again,” shouted Murakami, wet-faced and grinning as he squeezed in through the door that led out to the observation deck. His clothes were drenched. Behind him, the wind screamed, grabbed at the door frame, and tried to follow him inside. He fought it off with an effort and slammed the door. Storm autolocks engaged with a solid clunk. “Visibility’s dropping through the floor. These guys are never going to know what hit them.”
“Then it’ll be nothing like Kasengo,” I said irritably, remembering. My eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. “Those guys were expecting us.”
“Yeah, true.” He raked water out of his hair with both hands and shook it off his fingers onto the floor. “But we still trashed them.”
“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 bellowing 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.