No recoil, no visible flash, and no punch backwards where it hit. The crackle snarled past my ears and Hand stood there blinking with a smoking hole in his guts. Then he must have caught the stench of his own seared intestines and, looking down, he made a high-pitched hooting noise that was as much panic as pain.

The ultra compacts take a while to recharge, but I didn’t need peripheral vision to tell me jumping Carrera would be a mistake. Noncoms on the loading deck above, Loemanako beside me and the little knot of Wedge officers hadn’t dispersed at all—they’d just fanned out and given us room to walk into the set-up.

Neat. Very neat.

Hand staggered, still wailing, and sat down hard on his backside in the sand. Some brutal part of me wanted to laugh at him. His hands pawed the air close to the gaping wound.

I know that feeling, some other part of me recalled, surprised into brief compassion. It hurts, but you don’t know if you dare touch it.

“Mistaken again,” said Carrera to the ripped open exec at his feet. His tone hadn’t shifted since the shooting. “I am not a civilised man, Hand, I’m a soldier. A professional savage, and I’m on hire to men just like you. I wouldn’t like to say what that makes you. Except out of fashion back at the Mandrake Tower, that is.”

The noise Hand was making shaped towards a conventional scream. Carrera turned to look at me.

“Oh, you can relax Kovacs. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to do that before now.”

I manufactured a shrug. “Once or twice. I probably would have got around to it.”

“Well, now you don’t have to.”

On the ground, Hand twisted and propped himself. Something that might have been words emerged from his agony. At the edge of my vision, a couple of figures moved towards him: peripheral scan, still squeezed to aching point by the adrenalin surge, identified Sutjiadi and—well, well—Tanya Wardani.

Carrera waved them back.

“No, there’s no need for that.”

Hand was definitely speaking now, a ruptured hissing of syllables that weren’t any language I knew or, except once, had heard. His left hand was raised towards Carrera, fingers splayed. I crouched to his level, oddly moved by the contorted strength on his face.

“What’s this?” The Wedge commander leaned closer. “What’s he saying?”

I sat back on my heels. “I think you’re being cursed.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s not unreasonable under the circumstances. Still.” Carrera swung a long, heavy kick into the exec’s side. Hand’s incantation shredded apart in a scream and he rolled into a foetal ball. “No reason why we have to listen to it either. Sergeant.”

Loemanako stepped forward. “Sir.”

“Your knife please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Give Carrera credit—I’d never seen him ask any man in his command to carry out work he wouldn’t do himself. He took the vibroknife from Loemanako, activated it and kicked Hand again, stamping him onto his belly in the sand. The exec’s screams blurred into coughing and whooping sucked breath. Carrera knelt across his back and started cutting.

Hand’s muffled shrieking scaled abruptly up as he felt the blade enter his flesh, and then stopped dead as Carrera sliced his spinal column through.

“Better,” muttered the Wedge commander.

He made the second incision at the base of the skull, a lot more elegantly than I had back in the Landfall promoter’s office, and dug out the section of severed spine. Then he powered off the knife, wiped it carefully on Hand’s clothing and got up. He handed knife and spinal segment to Loemanako with a nod.

“Thank you, sergeant. Get that to Hammad, tell him not to lose it. We just earnt ourselves a bonus.”

“Yes, sir.” Loemanako looked at the faces around us. “And, uh…?”

“Oh, yes.” Carrera raised one hand. His face seemed suddenly tired. “That.”

His hand fell like something discarded.

From the loading deck above I heard the discharge, a muffled crump followed by a chitinous rustling. I looked up and saw what looked like a swarm of crippled nanocopters tumbling down through the air.

I made the intuitive leap to what was going to happen with a curious detachment, a lack of combat reflex that must have had its roots in the mingled radiation sickness and tetrameth comedown. I just had time to look at Sutjiadi. He caught my eye and his mouth twitched. He knew as well as I did. As well as if there’d been a scarlet decal pulsing across the screen of our vision.

Game—

Then it was raining spiders.

Not really, but it looked that way. They’d fired the crowd control mortar almost straight up, a low-power crimped load for limited dispersal. The grey fist-sized inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty metres. The ones at the nearest edge glanced off the curving side of the battlewagon’s hull before they hit the sand, skidding and flailing for purchase with a minute intensity that I later recalled almost with amusement. The others bedded directly in puffs of turquoise sand and scuttled up out of the tiny craters they’d made like the tiny jewelled crabs in Tanya Wardani’s tropical paradise virtuality.

They fell in thousands.

Game—

They dropped on our heads and shoulders, soft as children’s cradle toys, and clung.

They scuttled towards us across the sand and scrambled up our legs.

They endured batting and shaking and clambered on undeterred.

The ones Sutjiadi and the others tore loose and flung away landed in a whirl of limbs and scuttled back unharmed.

They crouched knowledgeably above nerve points and plunged filament-thin tendril fangs through clothing and skin.

Game—

They bit in.

—Over.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

There was no less reason for adrenalin to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shrivelled my sleeve’s capacity to deliver combat chemicals. The inhibitors reacted accordingly. I felt the nerve snap go through me, but it was a mild numbness, a fizzing that only dropped me to one knee.

The Maori sleeves were readier for a fight and so they took it harder. Deprez and Sutjiadi staggered and crashed into the sand as if shot with stunners. Vongsavath managed to control her fall, and rolled to the ground on her side, eyes wide.

Tanya Wardani just stood there looking dazed.

“Thank you gentlemen.” It was Carrera, calling up to the noncoms manning the mortar. “Exemplary grouping.”

Neural inhib remotes. State-of-the-art public order tech. Only cleared colonial embargo a couple of years ago. In my capacity as a local military adviser, I’d had the shiny new system demonstrated to me on crowds in Indigo City. I’d just never been on the receiving end before now.

Chill, an enthusiastic young public order corporal had told me with a grin. That’s all you need to do. ‘Course, that’s extra funny in a riot situation. This shit lands on you, you’re just going to get more ‘dreened up, means they just go on biting you, maybe even stop your heart in the end. Have to be fucking Zen-rigged to break the spiral, and you know what, we’re short on Zen riot activists this season.

I held the Envoy calm like a crystal, wiped my mind of consequence and got up. The spiders clung and flexed a little as I moved, but they didn’t bite again.

“Shit, lieutenant, you’re coated. They must like you.”

Loemanako stood grinning at me from within a circle of clear sand, while surplus inhibitor units crawled around on the outer edge of the field his clean tag must be throwing down. A little to his right, Carrera moved in a similar pool of immunity. I glanced around and saw the other Wedge officers, untouched and watching.

Neat. Very fucking neat.

Behind them, political officer Lamont capered and pointed at us, jabbering.