We waited for a second after the grenade died, then Murakami fired the plasmafrag rifle downward. There was no reaction. I crept down past the blackened, cooling corpses of the pirates, gagging at the stench. Peered past the inward-curled, despairing limbs of the one who’d met the brunt of the fire, and saw an empty corridor. Yellow cream walls, floor and ceiling, brilliantly lit with overhead strips of inlaid illuminum. Close to the foot of the stairwell, everything was painted with broad swathes of blood and clotted tissue.
“Clear.”
We picked our way through the gore and moved cautiously up the corridor, into the heart of the wet-bunker’s base levels. Tanaseda hadn’t known where exactly the captives would be held—the haiduci were twitchy and aggressive about allowing the yakuza a presence in Kossuth in the first place. Precarious in his new role of penitent failed blackmailer, Tanaseda had still insisted, on his own admission because he’d hoped to retrieve the whereabouts of Yukio Hirayasu’s stack from me by torture or extortion and thus cut his loss of face, at least among his own colleagues. Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka, for some byzantine reason or other, agreed and in the end, it was her pressure on Segesvar that forged the diplomatic cooperation between yakuza and haiduci. Tanaseda had been welcomed formally by Segesvar himself, and then been told in no uncertain terms that he’d best find himself accommodation in Newpest or Sourcetown, stay away from the farm unless specifically summoned and keep his men on a tight leash. He’d certainly not been given a tour of the premises.
But really, there was only one secure place in the complex for people you didn’t want dead yet. I’d seen it a couple of times on previous visits, had once even watched some doomed gambling junkie conveyed there while Segesvar thought about how exactly to make an example of him. If you wanted to lock a man up on the farm, you put him where even a monster couldn’t break free. You locked him in the panther cells.
We paused at a crossways, where ventilation systems gaped open above us. Faintly, down the conduits, came the sounds of ongoing battle. I gestured left, murmuring.
“Down there. The panther cells are all on the right at the next turn, they open onto tunnels that lead directly into the pens. Segesvar converted a couple of them for human holding. Got to be one of those.”
“Alright, then.”
We picked up the pace again, took the right turn, and then I heard the smooth, solid hum of one of the doors on the cells sliding down into the floor. Footsteps and urgent voices beyond. Segesvar and Aiura, and a third voice I’d heard before but couldn’t place. I clamped down on the savage spurt of joy, flattened myself to the wall and waved Jad and Murakami back.
Aiura, compressed rage as I tuned in.
“…really expect me to be impressed by this?”
“Don’t you hand me that shit,” snapped Segesvar. “This is that slant-eyed yak fuck you insisted on bringing aboard. I told you—”
“Somehow, Segesvar-san, I do not think—”
“And don’t fucking call me that either. This is Kossuth, not the fucking north. Have a bit of cultural sensitivity, why don’t you. Anton, you sure there’s no intrusion ‘cast going down?”
And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.
“Nothing. This is strictly—”
I should have seen it coming.
I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly-lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—
Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.
“Anton, you motherless fuck!”
I came off the wall, spinning to cover them all with the Rapsodia.
Too late.
I took in a glimpse of the three of them, gaping in shock. Segesvar met my eyes and flinched. Jad stood braced, shard gun riding her hip, levelled.
Anton saw and reacted, deCom swift. He seized Aiura Harlan Tsuruoka by the shoulders and hurled her in front of him. The shard gun coughed.
The Harlan security exec screa—
—and came apart from shoulders to waist as the monomol swarm ripped through her. Blood and tissue exploded through the air around us, splattered me, blinded me—
In the time it took me to wipe my eyes, they were both gone. Back through the cell they’d come out of, and the tunnel beyond. What remained of Aiura lay on the floor in three pieces and puddles of gore.
“Jad, what the fuck are you playing at?” I yelled.
She wiped her face, smearing blood. “Told you I’d get him.”
I grabbed at calm. Stabbed a finger at the carnage around our feet. “You didn’t get him, Jad. He’s gone.” Calm failed me, collapsed catastrophically before focusless fury. “How could you be so fucking stupid. He’s fucking gone.”
“Then I’ll fucking catch him up.”
“No, we nee—”
But she was already moving again, across the opened cell at a fast deCom lope. Ducking into the tunnel.
“Nice going, Tak,” said Murakami sardonically. “Command presence. I like that.”
“Shut up, Tod. Just find the monitor room, check the cells. They’re all around here somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I was backing off, moving before I finished speaking. Sprinting again, after Jad, after Segesvar.
After something.
FORTY-SIX
The tunnel came out in a fight pit. Steep, sloping evercrete sides, ten metres tall and torn ragged for half their height by decades of swamp panthers trying to claw their way out. Railed spectator space around the top, all open to a sky clogged with a fast-moving stampede of greenish cloud cover. It was impossible to look directly up in the rain. Thirty centimetres of thick mud in the bottom of the pit, now pounded into brown sludge by the downpour. The drainage vents in the walls couldn’t keep up.
I squinted through the water in the air and on my face, spotted Jad halfway up the narrow maintenance ladder cut into one corner of the pit.
Bawled at her over the sound of the storm. “Jad! Fucking wait!”
She paused, hanging off the ladder rung, shard blaster pointing downward.
Then waved and went on climbing.
I cursed, stowed the Rapsodia and went after her up the ladder. Rain cascaded down the walls past me and drummed on my head. I seemed to hear blasterfire somewhere above.
When I got to the top, a hand came down and grasped my wrist. I jolted with shock and and looked up to see Jad peering down at me.
“Stay low,” she called. “They’re up here.”
Cautiously, I got my head above the level of the pit and looked out across the network of gantries and spectator galleries that criss-crossed the fight pits. Thick curtains of rain skirled across the view. At more than ten metres, visibility faded to grey, at twenty it was gone. Somewhere on the other side of the farm, I could hear the firefight still raging, but here there was only the storm. Jad lay flat on her belly at the edge of the pit. She saw me cast about and leaned closer.
“They split up,” she shouted in my ear. “Anton’s heading for the moorage space on the far side. My guess is he’s looking for a ride out, or maybe the other you to give him some backup. The other guy cut back through the pens over there, looks like he wants to fight. Fired on me just now.”
I nodded. “Alright, you get after Anton, I’ll take care of Segesvar. I’ll cover you when you move.”
“Done.”
I grabbed her shoulder as she rolled over. Pulled her back for a moment.
“Jad, you just be fucking careful. If you run into me out there—”
Her teeth split in a grin, and the rain trickled into her teeth.
“Then I’ll waste him for you at no extra charge.”
I joined her on the flat space of the wallwalk, drew the Rapsodia and dialled it to tight dispersal, maximum range. I squirmed about and settled into a half-reclining crouch.