FOUR

The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering.

Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.

Shit.

Bang bang.

I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.

Bang, bang, bang.

“Fuck is that?” yelled someone from an inner room.

Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.

“Door,” I said, feeling foolish.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.”

The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.

“Will someone fucking answer that!” It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.

“Got it,” Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. “Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.”

She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.

“You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?” she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. “We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!”

There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad.

He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.

Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.

“Kovacs,” Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. “What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’d have thought that was my line.”

Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.

“You were told,” snapped Yukio, “to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?”

“These your high-powered friends, Micky?” It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.

I nodded. “You might say that.”

Yukio’s eyes flickered to the woman’s voice and he frowned. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him, maybe it was just the five to three disadvantage he’d just walked into.

“You know who I am,” he began. “So let’s not complicate matters any—”

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” said Sylvie evenly. “But I know you’re in our place without an invitation. So I think you’d better just leave.”

The yakuza’s face flared disbelief.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here.” Jadwiga threw up both hands in something midway between a combat guard and a gesture of obscene dismissal.

“Jad—” I started, but by then it had all already tipped too far.

Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me. Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it.

She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odour of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped.

I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns. I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad.

“Right.” Yukio looked around the rest of the room, wagging the blaster mainly in Sylvie’s direction. “That’s enough. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but you—”

Sylvie spat out a single word.

“Orr.”

Thunder detonated in the confined space again. This time, it was blinding.

I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still halfway up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down. His mouth gaped wide. His sun lenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare.

The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.

The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons.

The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up.

Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.

The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels.

“Well. That seemed to work.”

Orr stepped past me, peering down at what was apparently his handiwork.

He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back. They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her.

“Narrow beam,” he diagnosed. “Took out the heart and most of the right lung. Not much we can do for her here.”

“Someone close the door,” suggested Sylvie.

As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech. Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up.

“Report this?” Kiyoka, a slight woman in what had to be a custom-grown Maori sleeve, wanted to know. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip.

“To?” Orr flipped her a rapid thumb and little finger gesture. His other hand traced tattooing across his face.

“Oh. And him?”

Sylvie did something with her face, gestured low. I missed it, guessed and grabbed.

“They were here for me.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Orr was looking at me with something that grazed open hostility. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn’t hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast. “Some nice friends you’ve got.”