“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 tilted 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.
“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 loose, 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.”