“Tanya.”

She heard it in my voice. “What now?”

“It’s a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?”

“Right.” She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. “There’s a shutdown procedure that doesn’t require encoding, yes. How did you know?”

I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn’t usually work this way. “Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterwards.”

Her voice lowered. “Yes.”

“This shutdown. How long will it take?”

“I, fuck, Kovacs. I don’t know. A couple of hours. Why?”

“Carrera isn’t dead.”

She coughed up a fractured laugh. “What?”

“You see that big fucking hole in Luc.” The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. “Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy and is by now on the other side of the fucking gate. That clear enough for you?”

“Then why don’t you leave him there?”

“Because if I do,” I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the ‘meth surge. “If I do, he’ll swim up while you’re trying to close the gate and he’ll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead. Very shortly.”

“Then why don’t we just get the fuck out of here right now?” asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the Angin Chandra’s Virtue. “In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. Fuck it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months.”

I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.

“No. We have to close the gate.”

Vongsavath threw up her hands. “What the fuck for? Who care—”

“Stow it, Ameli.” I flexed the suit upright again. “Tell the truth, I don’t think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I’m afraid we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.

I wasn’t sure if that was the ‘meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whisky on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn’t seem to matter that much.

Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.

“You going on the bug?” she asked. “Or do you want an impeller frame?”

“We’ll need both.”

“Yeah?” she looked suddenly interested. “How come? Do you want me—”

“The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty kiloton yield. I’m going to fire that motherfucker across and see if we can’t fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won’t. He’ll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I’ll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that,” I shrugged. “It’s a fair fight.”

“And I suppose I’m not—”

“Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?”

“Around here?” she looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. “It feels out of place.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

You can’t do this,” said Wardani quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre of the gate-space, and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

“Tanya, we’ve seen this thing withstand weapons that…” I searched for adequate words. “That I for one don’t understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you. Look at you.”

I looked down at controls on the firing board. “I’m good for a couple more days.”

“Yeah—in a hospital bed. Do you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you’re in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.”

“Rubbish. You’re forgetting the tetrameth.”

“Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?”

“Long enough.” I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. “What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?”

“Kovacs.” She waited until I looked at her. “Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I’ll get the gate closed.”

“Tanya, why didn’t you shoot me with the stunner?”

Silence.

“Tanya?”

“Alright,” she said violently. “Piss your fucking life away out there. See if I care.”

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

“I,” she dropped her gaze. “I panicked.”

“That, Tanya, is bullshit. I’ve seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn’t been any of them. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

“Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?”

“Well enough.”

She snorted. “Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge people?”

“People like Schneider, you mean?” I shrugged. “He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don’t you. He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.”

“Oh, you’re feeling proud of yourself, is that it?” She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up towards us. “Think you’ve achieved something here, do you?”

“You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?”

“No!”

“It’s not a problem, Tanya.” I shrugged again. “The only thing I can’t work out is why I didn’t die. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I, I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.”

“Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn’t. That, and why I woke up so fast.”

“Maybe,” she said, not looking at me, “You don’t have whatever is inside the rest of us.”

“Hoy, Kovacs.”

We both shifted to look down the beach again.

“Kovacs. Look what I found.”

It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.

“I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Who is it?”

I rustled up a dry chuckle. “Survivor type. Look.”

Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we’d met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognised me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of metres away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.

“Knew it!” He cackled out loud. “Knew you’d do it. Got files on you, I knew you would. I heard you. Heard you, but I didn’t say.”

“Found him in the armoury crawlspace,” said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. “Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.”

“Heard you, saw you,” said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. “Got files on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs. Knew you’d do it.”

“Did you,” I said sombrely.

“Heard you, saw you, but I didn’t say.”

“Yeah, well that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It’s in the directives.” I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five metres behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.