“Knew you’d do it,” he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.

“Did you get the impeller?” I asked Vongsavath.

I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren’t shielded and I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.

Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes—it wouldn’t permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.

Then why are you sitting here, Tak?

Suit’ll soak it up.

But it was a little more than that. Sat astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn’t that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.

Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the ‘meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to—

Or maybe you’re just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the Mivtsemdi all over again.

Shall we just get on with it?

The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow enough to be visible, breached the gate-space with a faint sucking sound and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn’t think it worth mentioning.

Nice to be right, huh?

Not that it matters much now anyway.

I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and ploughed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.

“Two hours, you said, Tanya.”

She ignored me. She hadn’t spoken since I shot Lamont.

“Well.” I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. “Whatever you’ve got to do, start doing it now.”

“What if you’re not back in time?” objected Vongsavath.

I grinned. “Don’t be stupid. If I can’t waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I’m not coming back. You know that.”

Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.

Through the gate. Look—easy as falling.

My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.

Here we fucking go again.

Carrera made his play.

Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems nickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defences the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinselled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.

By then, I was too busy to watch.

I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.

Not yet.

The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn’t have one of those to hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug’s drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera’s next move.

Come on you motherfucker.

Ah-ah. You’re expecting, Tak.

We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

Thanks, Virginia.

Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn’t have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn’t suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.

I hadn’t had time to find and install the Wedge’s battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn’t either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako’s team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched—there wouldn’t be much.

You hope.

The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favour. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.

There.

Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.

I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera’s missile homing in on the bug.

I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward towards the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn’t see me, and by the time he could…

Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.

Not yet. Not—

Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometre now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he’d have to deal with, and while he was doing that I’d get close.

I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.

Space erupted in light around me.

For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.