Vongsavath nodded. “Prelim systems scramblers, I’d guess. To fuck up the defence net. Maybe it’s some kind of grav disruptor, I’ve heard Mitoma are doing research into—” she broke off. “Look, here comes the next torpedo spread. Man, that’s a lot of hardware for a single launch.”

She was right. The space ahead of the attacking vessel had filled up with tiny golden traces so dense they could have been interference across the surface of the screen. Secondary displays yanked in detail and I saw how the swarm wove intricate mutual distract-and-protect evasion across millions of kilometres of space.

“These are FTL too, I think.” Sun shook her head. “The screens deal with it somehow, gives a representation. I think this has all already happened.”

The vessel I was standing on thrummed distantly, separate vibrations coming in from a dozen different angles. Outside, the shields shimmered again, and I got the vague sense of a shoal of something dark slipping out in the microsecond pulses of lowered energy.

“Counterlaunch,” said Vongsavath with something like satisfaction in her voice. “Same thing again.”

It was too fast to watch. Like trying to keep track of laser fire. On the screens, the new swarm flashed violet, threading through the approaching sleet of gold and detonating in blots of light that inked out as soon as they erupted. Every flash took specks of gold with it until the sky between the two vessels emptied out.

“Beautiful,” breathed Vongsavath. “Fucking beautiful.”

I woke up.

“Tanya, I heard the word ‘safe.’ ” I gestured up at the battle raging in rainbow representation over our heads. “You call this safe?”

The archaeologue said nothing. She was staring at Luc Deprez’s bloodied face and clothing.

“Relax, Kovacs.” Vongsavath pointed out one of the trajectory mappers. “It’s a cometary, see. Wardani read the same thing off the glyphs. Just going to swing past and trade damage, then on and out again.”

“A cometary?”

The pilot spread her hands. “Post-engagement graveyard orbit, automated battle systems. It’s a closed loop. Been going on for thousands of years, looks like.”

“What happened to Jan?” Wardani’s voice was stretched taut.

“He left without us.” A thought struck me. “He made the gate, right? You saw that?”

“Yeah, like a prick up a cunt,” said Vongsavath with unexpected venom. “Man could fly when he needed to. That was my fucking ship.”

“He was afraid,” said the archaeologue numbly.

Luc Deprez stared at her out of his blood-masked face. “We were all afraid, Mistress Wardani. It is not an excuse.”

“You fool.” She looked around at us. “All of you, you fucking. Fools. He wasn’t afraid of this. This fucking. Light show. He was afraid of him.”

The jerked nod was for me. Her eyes nailed mine.

“Where’s Jiang?” asked Sun suddenly. In the storm of alien technology around us, it had taken that long to notice the quiet ninja’s absence.

“Luc’s wearing most of him,” I said brutally. “The rest is lying back on the docking bay floor, courtesy of the Nagini’s ultravibe. I guess Jan must have been afraid of him as well, huh Tanya?”

Wardani’s gaze flinched aside.

“And his stack?” Nothing showed on Sutjiadi’s face, but I didn’t have to see it. The wolf splice custom was dying to give me the same sinus-aching ride back behind the bridge of my nose.

Pack member down.

I locked it down with Envoy displacement trickery. Shook my head.

“Ultravibe, Markus. He got the full blast.”

“Schneider—” Vongsavath broke off and had to start again. “I will—”

“Forget about Schneider,” I told her, “He’s dead.”

“Get in the queue.”

“No, he’s dead, Ameli. Really dead.” And as their eyes fixed on me, as Tanya Wardani looked back disbelieving. “I mined the Nagini’s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporised the minute he crashed the gate. Be lucky if there’s tinsel left.”

Over our heads, another wave of gold and violet missiles found each other in the machine dance and, flickering, wiped each other out.

“You blew up the Nagini?” It was hard to tell what Vongsavath was feeling, her voice was so choked. “You blew up my ship?”

“If the wreckage is so dispersed,” said Deprez thoughtfully, “Carrera may assume we were all killed in the explosion.”

“If Carrera is actually out there, that is.” Hand was looking at me the way he’d looked at the songspires. “If this isn’t all an Envoy ploy.”

“Oh, what’s the matter, Hand? Did Schneider try to cut some kind of deal with you when you went walkabout?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kovacs.”

Maybe he didn’t. I was abruptly too weary to care one way or the other.

“Carrera will come out here whatever happens.” I told them. “He’s thorough that way, and he’ll want to see the ship. He’ll have some way of standing down the nanobe system. But he won’t come yet. Not with little pieces of the Nagini littering the landscape, and emissions pick-up from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That’s going to back him up a little. It gives us some time.”

“Time to do what?” asked Sutjiadi.

The moment hung, and the Envoy crept out to play in it. Across splayed peripheral vision, I watched their faces and their stance, measured the possible allegiances, the possible betrayals. Locked down the emotions, peeled away the useful nuances they could give me, and dumped the remainder. Tied the wolf pack loyalty off, smothered whatever feeling still swam murkily in the space between Tanya Wardani and myself. Descended into the structured cold of Envoy mission time. Decided, and played my last card.

“Before I mined the Nagini, I stripped the spacesuits off the corpses we recovered, and stashed them in a recess in the first chamber outside the docking bay. Leaving aside the one with the blasted helmet, that’s four viable suits. They’re standard issue pull-ons. The airpacks will replenish from unpressured atmosphere environments like this one. Set the valves, they just suck it up. We leave in two waves. Someone from the first wave comes back with spare suits.”

“All this,” jeered Wardani, “with Carrera waiting on the other side of the gate to snap us up. I don’t think so.”

“I’m not suggesting we do it now,” I said quietly. “I’m just suggesting we go back and recover the suits while there’s time.”

“And when Carrera comes aboard? What do you suggest we do then?” The hatred welling up in Wardani’s face was one of the uglier things I’d seen recently. “Hide from him?”

“Yes.” I watched for reactions. “Exactly that. I suggest we hide. We move deeper into the ship and we wait. Whatever team Carrera deploys will have enough hardware to find traces of us in the docking bay and other places. But they won’t find anything that can’t be explained by our presence here before we all boarded the Nagini and blew ourselves to tinsel. The logical thing to do is assume that we all died. He’ll do a sweep, he’ll deploy a claim buoy, just the way we planned to, and then he’ll leave. He doesn’t have the personnel or the time to occupy a hulk over fifty klicks long.”

“No,” said Sutjiadi, “But he’ll leave a caretaker squad.”

I made an impatient gesture. “Then we’ll kill them.”

“And I have no doubt there’ll be a second detachment waiting on the other side of the gate,” Deprez said sombrely.

“So what? Jesus, Luc. You used to do this for a living, didn’t you?”

The assassin gave me an apologetic smile. “Yes, Takeshi. But we are all of us sick. And this is the Wedge you are talking about. As many as twenty men here, perhaps the same again on the other side of the gate.”

“I don’t think we really—” A sudden tremor jagged across the deck, enough to make Hand and Tanya Wardani stumble slightly. The rest of us rode it out with combat-conditioned ease, but still…