“Lazlo,” I guessed.

“Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”

“Long story. You want to talk to Sylvie?”

“That’d be nice.” The irony was ladled on. I stood aside and let him in.

Sylvie gave him a weary top-to-toe look.

“Got in the life-raft launcher,” Lazlo announced. “Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it.”

Sylvie sighed. “It’s not big, Las, it’s not clever and some day you’ll miss the fucking boat. What are we going to do for a lead then?”

“Well, looks to me like you’re already lining up replacements.” A cocked glance in my direction. “Who is this, exactly?”

“Micky, Lazlo.” An idle gesture back and forth between us. “Lazlo, meet Micky Serendipity. Temporary travelling companion.”

“Did you get him aboard with my flashes?”

Sylvie shrugged. “You never use them.”

Lazlo spotted Jadwiga’s form on the bed and a grin lit up his bony face.

He strode across the cabin and slapped her on one buttock. When she didn’t respond, he frowned. I shut the door.

“Jesus, what did she take last night?”

“She’s dead, Las.”

“Dead?

“For the moment, yes.” Sylvie looked across at me. “You’ve missed rather a lot of the dance since yesterday.”

Lazlo’s eyes followed Sylvie’s gaze across the cabin. “And it all has something to do with tall, dark and synthetic there, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

Lazlo went across to the basin niche and ran water into his cupped hands. He lowered his face into the water and snorted. Then he wiped the surplus water back through his hair, straightened up and eyed me in the mirror. He turned pointedly towards Sylvie.

“Alright, skipper. I’m listening.”

SIX

It took a day and a night to get to Drava.

From about midway across the Andrassy Sea, Guns for Guevara ran throttled back, sensor net spread as wide as it would go, weapons systems at standby. The official line from the Mecsek government was that the mimints had all been designed for a land war and so had no way of getting off New Hok. On the ground, deCom crews reported seeing machines there were no descriptors for in the Military Machine Intelligence archive, which suggested at least some of the weaponry still prowling the continent had found ways to evolve beyond its original programme parameters. The whispered word was that experimental nanotech had run wild. The official line said nanotech systems were too crude and too poorly understood at the time of the Unsettlement to have been deployed as weapons. The whispered word was dismissed as anti-government scaremongering, the official line was derided in every place you could find intelligent conversation.

Without satellite cover or aerial support, there was no way to prove the thing either way. Myth and misinformation reigned.

Welcome to Harlan’s World.

“Hard to believe,” muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometres up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. “Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.”

Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armoured spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivvied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side.

Overhead, the sky was an unpromising grey in all directions.

Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. “Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.”

“Yeah, count me in,” said Kiyoka. “Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.”

It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analogue of the fifty metre bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars.

No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all human scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a lance of angel fire.

Lazlo blew on his hands. “They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.”

“Oh, man, here we go again.” Kiyoka rolled her eyes.

“There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,” said Lazlo doggedly.

“Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—”

Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.

“—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches them when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens all the time, man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—”

“I did hear that one,” said Sylvie irritably. “Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.”

“Skipper, they said that, sure. They would say that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Las, old son.” Orr dropped a heavy arm around the lead wincefish’s shoulders. “If it’d been angelfire, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. You know that. And you know damn well there’s a fucking hole in the coverage down around the equator big enough to drive a whole fleet of colony barges through if you do the math right. Now why don’t you give the conspiracy shit a rest and check out the scenery you dragged us all up here to see.”

It was an impressive enough sight. Drava, in its day, was both trade gateway and naval port for the whole New Hokkaido hinterland. The waterfront saw shipping from every major city on the planet and the sprawl of architecture behind the docks reached back a dozen kilometres into the foothills to provide homes for almost five million people. At the height of its commercial powers, Drava rivalled Millsport for wealth and sophistication, and the navy garrison was one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere.

Now we cruised past rows of smashed-in Settlement-Years warehouses, containers and cranes tumbled across the docks like children’s toys and merchant vessels sunk at anchor end to end. There were lurid chemical stains on the water around us, and the only living things in view were a miserable-looking clutch of ripwings flapping about on the canted, corrugated roof of a warehouse. One of them flung back its neck and uttered a clattering challenge as we went past, but you could tell its heart wasn’t in it.

“Want to watch out for those,” said Kiyoka grimly. “They don’t look like much but they’re smart. Most places on this coast they’ve already polished off the cormorants and the gulls, and they’ve been known to attack humans too.”

I shrugged. “Well, it’s their planet.”

The deCom beachhead fortifications came into view. Hundreds of metres of razor-edged livewire crawling restlessly about inside its patrol parameters, jagged rows of crouched spider blocks on the ground and robot sentries perched brooding on the surrounding rooftops. In the water, a couple of automated minisubs poked conning towers above the surface, bracketing the curve of the estuary. Surveillance kites flew at intervals, tethered to crane stacks and a communications mast in the heart of the beachhead.

Guns for Guevara cut power and drifted in broadside between the two subs. On the dockside, a few figures paused in what they were doing and voices floated across the closing gap to the new arrivals. Most of the work was done by machines, silently. Beachhead security interrogated the hoverloader’s navigational intelligence and gave clearance. The auto grapple system talked to the sockets on the dock, agreed trajectory and fired home. Cables cranked tight and pulled the vessel in. An articulated boarding corridor flexed itself awake and nuzzled up to the dockside loading hatch. Buoyancy antigrav kicked over to mooring levels with a shiver. Doors unlatched.