As we turned to go, her face twitched with incoming traffic. She jerked back round to look at Kurumaya, irritated.

“Yes?”

He smiled gently at her. “Just so we’re clear, Oshima-san. You’ll be webbed into a sweep pattern with the others. If you do try and slide out again, I’ll know. I’ll pull your authorisation and I’ll have you brought back in, if I have to deploy the whole sweep to do it. You want to be arrested by a bunch of sprogs and then frogmarched back here, you just try me.”

Sylvie produced another sigh, shook her head sorrowfully and walked out through the throng of queuing deComs. As we passed Anton, he showed his teeth.

“Maintenance rate, Sylvie,” he sneered. “Looks like you found your level at last.”

Then he flinched, his eyes fluttered upward and his expression blanked as Sylvie reached in and twisted something inside his head. He swayed and the deCom next to him had to grab his arm to steady him. He made a noise like a freak fighter taking a heavy punch. Slurred voice, thick with outrage.

“Fucking—”

“Back off, swamp boy.” It trailed out behind her, laconic, as we left the ‘fab.

She hadn’t even looked in his direction.

SEVEN

The gate was a single slab of grey alloy armouring six metres across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-metre towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the grey metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.

Kurumaya’s clean-up volunteers stood about in small knots before the gate, muttered conversation laced with brief flares of loud bravado. As Sylvie had predicted, most were young and inexperienced, both qualities telegraphed clearly in the awkwardness with which they handled their equipment and gawked around them. The sparse assortment of hardware they had was none too impressive either. Weaponry looked to be largely obsolete military surplus, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen vehicles all told—transport for maybe half of the fifty-odd deComs present, some of it not even grav-effect. The rest, it seemed, were doing the sweep on foot.

Command heads were few and far between.

“How it’s done,” said Kiyoka complacently. She leaned back on the nose of the grav bug I was riding and folded her arms. The little vehicle rocked slightly on its parking cushion and I upped the field to compensate. “See, most sprogs got no money to speak of, they come into the game practically systems-blind. Try and earn cash for the upgrades with clean-up work and maybe some easy bounty on the edges of the Uncleared. If they get lucky, they do good work and someone notices them. Maybe some crew with losses takes them on.”

“And if not?”

“Then they go grow their own hair.” Lazlo grinned up from the opened pannier he was rifling through on one of the other two bugs. “Right, skipper?”

“Yeah, just like that.” There was a sour edge in Sylvie’s voice. Stood near the third bug with Orr for company, she was once again trying to make Jadwiga look like a living human being and the strain was showing. I wasn’t enjoying the process much myself—we’d got the dead deCom mounted on one of the bugs, but piloting the vehicle second-hand was beyond Sylvie’s control options, so Jad rode pillion behind me. It would have looked pretty strange if I’d got off while we waited and she’d stayed sitting there, so I stayed aboard too. Sylvie had the corpse drape one arm affectionately on my shoulder and left the other resting on my thigh. From time to time, Jadwiga’s head swivelled and her sunlensed features flexed in something approximating a grin. I tried to look casual about it.

“You don’t want to listen to Las,” Kiyoka advised me. “Not one in twenty sprogs is going to have what it takes to make Command. Sure, they could wire the stuff into your head, but you’d just go insane.”

“Yeah, like the skipper here.” Lazlo finished with the pannier, resealed it and wandered round to the other side.

“What happens,” said Kiyoka patiently. “You look for someone who can stand the heat and you form a co-op. Pool funds ‘til you can pay for them to get the hair plus basic plug-in for everybody else, and there you go. Brand new crew. What’re you looking at?”

This last to a young deCom who’d wandered over to stare enviously at the grav bugs and the equipment they mounted. He backed up a little at Kiyoka’s tone, but the hunger in his face stayed.

“Dracul line, right?” he said.

“That’s right.” Kiyoka rapped knuckles on the bug’s carapace. “Dracul Forty-One series, only three months off the Millsport factory lines and everything you heard about it is one hundred per cent true. Cloaked drives, internally mounted EMP and particle beam battery, fluid response shielding, integrated Nuhanovic smart systems. You name it, they built it in.”

Jadwiga twisted her head in the young deCom’s direction, and I guessed the dead mouth was trying on its grin again. Her hand moved off my shoulder and down my side. I shifted slightly in the seat.

“What’d it cost?” asked our new fan. Behind him, a small crowd of likeminded hardware enthusiasts was gathering.

“More than any of you’ll earn this year.” Kiyoka gestured airily. “Basic package starts at a hundred and twenty grand. And this is not the basic package.”

The young deCom took a couple of steps closer. “Can I—”

I speared him with a look. “No you can’t. I’m sitting on this one.”

“Come over here, kid.” Lazlo rapped on the carapace of the bug he was messing about with. “Leave the lovebirds alone—they’re both too hung over for manners. I’ll show you this one. Give you something to aspire to next season.”

Laughter. The little group of sprogs drifted in towards the invitation. I exchanged relieved glances with Kiyoka. Jadwiga patted my thigh and nestled her head on my shoulder. I glared across at Sylvie. Behind us, an address system cleared its throat.

“Gate release in five minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Check your tags.”

Whine of grav motors, minute scrape of poorly aligned rail runners. The gate lifted jerkily to the top of its twenty-metre run and the deComs trudged or rode, according to their finances, through the space beneath.

The livewire coiled and snaked back from the clean field our tags threw down, building itself into restless hedges over head height. We moved along a cleared path whose sides undulated like something out of a bad take dream.

Further out, the spider blocks shifted on their multiple haunches as they detected the approaching tag fields. When we got closer, they heaved their massive polyhedral bodies up off the cracked evercrete and scuttled aside in reverse imitation of their programmed block-and-crush function. I rode between them with wary attention. One night on Hun Home, I’d sat behind the fortifications of the Kwan Palace and listened to the screams as machines like these wiped out an entire assault wave of insurgent techninjas. For all their bulk and blind sluggishness, it hadn’t taken them very long.

Fifteen carefully negotiated minutes later, we cleared the beachhead’s defences and spilled untidily out into the streets of Drava. The dock surfacing gave way to rubble-strewn thoroughfares and sporadically intact apartment buildings averaging twenty storeys high. The style was Settlement-Years utilitarian standard—this close to the water, accommodation had been thrown up to serve the fledgling port, with little thought for aesthetics. Rows of small, recessed windows peered myopically out towards the sea. The raw evercrete walls were scarred from bombardment and worn from centuries of neglect. Bluish grey patches of lichen marked the places where the antibiotic sheathing had failed.

Overhead, watery sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and filtering down into the silent streets ahead. A gusting wind blew in off the estuary, seeming to hurry us forward. I glanced back and saw the livewire and spider blocks reknit behind us like a healing wound.