Military custom doesn’t work like that.

I tensed my body and the suit got me to my feet. I thought a kick to groin height and the suit lashed out with speed and strength to dent steel. A left-handed back fist long strike. The suit put it there like neurachem. I crouched and flexed, and knew the servos would put me five metres into the air on demand. I reached out with machined precision and picked up Loemanako’s interface gun right handed. Digits scrambled along the display as it recognised the Wedge codes in my undamaged palm. Red gleam of the load light, and I knew through the prickling in my palm what the magazine carried. The vacuum commando’s standby. Jacketed slugs, short-fused plasma core. Demolition load.

Outside, the machine somehow kicked Sutjiadi back up into screaming. Hoarse now, his voice was shredding. A deeper groundswell rose behind the shrieks. Audience cheers.

“Get the knife,” I told Deprez.

CHAPTER FORTY

Outside, it was a beautiful day.

The sun was warm on my skin and glinting off the hull of the battlewagon. There was a slight breeze coming in off the sea, scuffing whitecaps. Sutjiadi screamed his agony at a careless blue sky.

Glancing down to the shoreline, I saw they’d erected metal-framed banks of seats around the anatomiser. Only the top of the machine showed above the heads of the spectators. Neurachem reeled in a tighter view—a sense of heads and shoulders tensed in fascination at what was happening on the slab, and then suddenly a glimpse of something flapping, membrane-thin and blood-streaked, torn loose from Sutjiadi’s body by pincers and caught by the breeze. A fresh shriek floated up in its wake. I turned away.

You patched and evacuated Jimmy de Soto while he screamed and tried to claw out his own eyes. You can do this.

Functionality!

“Polalloy shed,” I muttered to Deprez and we moved down the beach to the far end of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, as rapidly as seemed safe without tripping some Wedge veteran’s combat-amped peripheral vision. There’s an art to it they teach you in covert ops—breath shallow, move smoothly. Minimise anything that might trigger the enemy’s proximity senses. Half a minute of itching exposure was all it took, and then we were shielded from the seat banks by the swell of the ‘Chandra’s hull.

On the far side of the shed, we came across a young Wedge uniform, braced on the structure and vomiting his guts up in the sand. He looked up out of a sweat-beaded face as we rounded the corner, features twisted in misery.

Deprez killed him with the knife.

I kicked open the door with mob suit strength and swung inside, eyes flexed out to total scan in the sudden gloom.

Lockers stood tidily against one wall. A corner table held an assortment of helmet frames. Wall racks offered boot bases and breathing apparatus. The hatch to the showers was open. A Wedge noncom looked round from a datacoil at another desk, face haggard and angry.

“I’ve already fucking told Artola I’m not—” She spotted the mob suit and peered, getting up. “Loemanako? What are you—”

The knife skipped through the air like a dark bird off my shoulder. It buried itself in the noncom’s neck, just above the collar bone and she jerked in shock, came a wavering step towards me, still peering, and then collapsed.

Deprez stepped past me, knelt to check his handiwork and then withdrew the knife. There was a clean economy of motion in his movements that belied the state of his radiation-blasted cells.

He stood up and caught me looking at him.

“Something?”

I nodded at the corpse he’d just made. “Not bad for a dying man, Luc.”

He shrugged. “Tetrameth. Maori sleeve. I have been worse equipped.”

I dumped the interface gun on the table, picked up a pair of helmet frames and tossed one to him. “You done this before?”

“No. I’m not a spaceman.”

“OK. Put this on. Hold the struts, don’t smudge the faceplate.” I gathered boot bases and breathing sets at tetrameth speed. “The air intake fits through here, like this. The pack straps over your chest.”

“We don’t nee—”

“I know, but it’s quicker this way. And it means you can keep the faceplate down. Might save your life. Now stamp down on the boot bases, they’ll stick in place. I’ve got to power this thing up.”

The shower systems were set into the wall next to the hatch. I got one unit running, then nodded at Deprez to follow me, and went through into the shower section. The hatch cycled closed behind us, and I caught the thick solvent odour of the polalloy pouring in the confined space. The operational unit’s lamps flashed orange in the low light surroundings, glinting off the dozens of twisting threads of polalloy where they ran down from the shower heads and spread like oil on the angled floor of the cubicle.

I stepped in.

It’s an eerie feeling the first time you do it, like being buried alive in mud. The polalloy lands on you in a thin coating that quickly builds to a sliding sludge. It masses on the dome of cross-netting at the top of the helmet frame, then topples and pours down around your head, stinging your throat and nostrils even through your locked breathing. Molecular repulsion keeps it off the surface of the faceplate, but the rest of the helmet is sheathed in twenty seconds. The rest of your body, right down to the boot bases, takes about half as long again. You try to keep it away from open wounds or raw flesh; it stings before it dries.

fffffffuuuuck

It’s airtight, watertight, utterly sealed, and it’ll stop a high-velocity slug like battlewagon armour. At a distance, it even reflects Sunjet fire.

I stepped down and felt through the polalloy for the breathing set controls. Thumbed the vent control. Air hissed under my jaw, filling the suit and popping it loose around my body. I killed the air and chinned the faceplate control. The plate hinged silently up.

“Now you. Don’t forget to hold your breath.”

Somewhere outside, Sutjiadi was still screaming. The tetrameth scratched at me. I almost yanked Deprez out of the shower, punched the air supply and watched as his suit popped.

“OK, that’s it.” I dialled down to intake standard. “Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit’s malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern.”

The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

“Try to stay alive, Luc.”

I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night—five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok’s hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she’d never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn’t identify.

Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

They spotted me at twenty metres—I wasn’t hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.