Yeah, or the haiduci.

Time to find out which.

I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much any more about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt.

We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously levelled.

I found the others a half dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor, the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognised but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amidst the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped round, levelled the blaster and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head round the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

“Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?”

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.

“Beats me. Looks like we got here too late. You know them?”

“Where’s Murakami?”

He gestured back the way he’d come. “Over the far side, up on the parking dock. He sent me to find you, case you needed help. Fighting’s mostly done, you know. Just mopping up and some good old piracy to do now.” He grinned again. “Time to get paid. Come on, this way.”

Numbly, I followed him. We crossed the wet bunker, through corridors marked with the signs of recent battle, blaster-charred walls and ugly splashes of shattered human tissue, the odd sprawled corpse and once an absurdly well-dressed middle-aged man sitting on the floor staring in catatonic disbelief at his shattered legs sticking straight out in front of him. He must have been flushed from the casino or the brothel when the raid started, must have fled down into the bunker complex and got caught in the crossfire. As we reached him, he raised both arms weakly towards us, and Vlad shot him with the plasmafrag. We left him with steam curling up from the massive hole through his chest and climbed up an access ladder into the body of the old baling station.

Out on the parking dock, there was similar carnage. Crumpled bodies were strewn across the wharf and in amongst the moored skimmers. Here and there, small flames burned where blasterfire had found something more readily flammable than human flesh and bone. Smoke drifted through the rain. The wind was definitely dying down.

Murakami was by the water, knelt beside a slumped Virginia Vidaura and talking urgently to her. One hand cradled the side of her face. A couple of Vlad’s pirates stood around, arguing amiably, with their weapons slung over their shoulders. They were all drenched, but apparently unharmed.

Across the forward carapace of a green-painted Expansemobile moored nearby, Anton’s body.

He lay head down, eyes frozen open, rainbow command-head hair trailing down almost to the water. There was a hole you could have put your head through where his chest and stomach had been. It looked as if Jad had got him dead centre from behind with the shard blaster’s focus dialled up to tight. The blaster itself lay discarded on the dock amidst pools of blood. Of Jad, there was no sign.

Murakami saw us coming and let go of Vidaura’s face. He picked up the shard blaster and held it out to me in both hands. The magazine was ejected, the breech clear. It had been fired empty, then discarded. He shook his head.

“We’ve looked for her, but there’s nothing. Col here says he thinks he saw her go into the water. Shot from the wall up there. Could be she was only winged but in this shit.” He gestured at the weather. “No way to tell ‘til we sweep for bodies. Storm’s moving out westward, dying off. We can look then.”

I stared down at Virginia Vidaura. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but she looked to be semi-conscious, head lolling. I turned back to Murakami.

“What the fuck is—”

And the shard blaster butt came up and hit me in the head.

White fire, disbelief. A brand new nosebleed.

Who—

I staggered, gaped, fell down.

Murakami stood over me. He tossed the shard blaster away and pulled a neat little stunner from his belt.

“Sorry, Tak.”

Shot me with it.

FORTY-SEVEN

At the end of a very long, darkened corridor, there’s a woman waiting for me. I’m trying to hurry, but my clothes are waterlogged and heavy, and the corridor itself is canted at an angle and almost knee-deep in viscous stuff that I’d think was congealing blood except it stinks of belaweed. I flounder forward on the submerged, tilted floor, but the open doorway doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Got a problem, sam?

I crank the neurachem, but something’s wrong with the bioware because what I can see is like an ultradistant sniperscope image. I only have to twitch and it dances about all over the place, hurting my eyes when they try to keep focus. Half the time the woman is Vlad’s well-endowed pirate comrade, stripped to the waist and bent over the modules of unfamiliar equipment on the floor of her cabin. Long, large breasts hanging like fruit—I can feel the roof of my mouth aching to suck in one of the blunt, darkened nipples. Then, just when I think I’ve got a grip on the view, it slides away and becomes a tiny kitchen with handpainted blinds that block out the Kossuth sunlight. There’s a woman there too, also stripped to the waist, but it isn’t the same one because I know her.

The scope wobbles again. My eyes stray to the hardware on the floor. Matt grey impact-resistant casings, lustrous black discs where datacoils will spring up when activated. The logo on each module is inscribed in ideographic characters that I recognise, though I don’t currently have a reading knowledge of either Hun Home or Earth Chinese. Tseng Psychographics. It’s a name I’ve seen around battlefields and psychosurgical recovery units in the recent past, a new name. A new star in the rarified constellation of military brand names, a name and a brand that only very well-funded organisations can afford.