Orr shot him a frowning glance.

“Better get the sprogs downstairs,” said Kiyoka.

Sylvie nodded. Over the local channel, she hurried the sweepers out of the last buildings and got them assembled behind the grav bugs. They wiped rain out of their faces and stared resentfully out across the plaza.

Sylvie stood up on the running boards at the rear of the bug and cued the coms jacket.

“Alright, listen,” she told them. “This looks pretty safe, but there’s no way to be sure, so we’re taking a new pattern. The bugs will cruise across to the far side and check the temple’s lower level. Say ten minutes. Then one bug backs up and maintains a sentry point while the other two work their way back round on either side of the plaza. When they get back to you safely, everybody comes across in a wedge and the foot sweepers go up to check the upper levels of the temple. Has everybody got that?”

Sullen wave of assent up and down the line. They couldn’t have cared less. Sylvie nodded to herself.

“Good enough. So let’s do it. Scan up.”

She twisted about on the bug and seated herself once more behind Orr.

As she leaned into him, I saw her lips move but the synth sleeve wasn’t up to hearing what she said. The murmur of the bug’s drives lifted fractionally and Orr drifted them out into the plaza. Kiyoka nudged the bug she and Lazlo were riding into a flanking position on the left and followed. I bent to my own controls and picked up the right flank.

After the relative press of the debris-choked streets, the plaza felt at once less oppressive and more exposed. The air seemed lighter, the rainsplash on the bug shield less intense. Over the open ground, the bugs actually picked up some speed. There was an illusory sensation of progress—and risk.

The Envoy conditioning, scratching for attention. Trouble, just over the perceptual horizon. Something getting ready to blow.

Hard to tell what gleanings of subconscious detail might have triggered it this time. Envoy intuitive functions are a temperamental set of faculties at the best of times, and the whole city had felt like a trap since we left the beachhead.

But you don’t dismiss that stuff.

You don’t dismiss it when it’s saved your life half a thousand times before, on worlds as far apart and different as Sharya and Adoracion.

When it’s wired into the core of who you are, deeper than the memory of your childhood.

My eyes ran a constant peripheral scan along the pagoda terracing. My right hand rested lightly on the weapons console.

Coming up on the wrecked scorpion gun.

Almost halfway.

There!

Flare of adrenalin analogue, rough through the synth system. My hand skittered on the fire control—

No.

Just the nodding flower heads on a stand of plant life sprouting up through the shattered carapace of the gun. Rain splatter knocking each flower gently down against the spring of its stalk.

My breathing eased back into action. We passed the scorpion gun and the halfway mark. The sense of impending impact stayed.

“You okay, Micky?” Sylvie’s voice in my ear.

“Yeah.” I shook my head. ”

“ ‘S nothing.”

At my back, Jadwiga’s corpse clutched me a little closer.

We made the shadows of the temple without incident. The angled stonework bulked over our heads, leading the eye upward towards huge statues of daiko drummers. Steep-leaning load-bearing support structures like drunken pillars, merging seamlessly with the fused-glass floor. Light fell in from side vents and rainwater from the roof in incessant clattering streams further back in the gloom. Orr pushed his bug inward with what seemed to me a lack of due care.

“This’ll do,” Sylvie called, voice loud enough to echo in the space we’d entered. She stood, leaned on Orr’s shoulder and twisted herself lithely to the floor beside the bug. “Make it quick, guys.”

Lazlo vaulted from the back of Kiyoka’s bug and prowled about for a while, apparently scanning the supporting structure of the temple. Orr and Kiyoka started to dismount.

“What are we—” I started, and stopped at the muffled sense of a dead comlink in my ear. I braked the bug, tugged the comset off and stared at it.

My gaze flickered to the deComs and what they were doing. “Boy! Someone want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?”

Kiyoka offered me a busy smile in passing. She was carrying a webbing belt strapped with enough demolition charges to—

“Sit tight, Micky,” she said easily. “Be done in a moment.”

“Here,” Lazlo was saying. “Here. And here. Orr?”

The giant waved a hand from the other side of the deserted space. “In hand. Maps just like you figured, Sylvie. Couple more, max.”

They were placing the charges.

I stared up at the propped and vaulted architecture.

“Oh no. Oh no, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I moved to get off and Jadwiga’s dead grip wrapped around my chest. “Sylvie!”

She looked up briefly from where she was knelt before a black satchelled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicoloured data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.

“Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ‘S all we need.”

I jerked a thumb backwards at Jadwiga. “Get this fucking thing off me, before I break it, Sylvie.”

She sighed and got up. Jadwiga let go of me and sagged. I twisted in the bug saddle and caught her before she could topple to the floor. Sylvie reached me about the same time. She nodded to herself.

“Okay. Want to be useful?”

“I want to know what the fuck this is about.”

“Later. Right now, you can take that knife I gave you back in Tekitomura and cut the stack out of Jad’s spine for me. Seems to be a core skill for you, and I don’t know that any of the rest of us want the duty.”

I looked down at the dead woman in my arms. She’d flopped face down and the sunlenses had slipped. One dead eye caught the faint light.

“Now you want to do the excision?”

“Yes, now.” Her eyes swivelled up to check a retinal display. We were on a clock. “In the next three minutes, because that’s about all we have.”

“All done this side,” called Orr.

I climbed off the bug and lowered Jadwiga to the fused-glass. The knife came to my hand as if it belonged there. I cut through the corpse’s clothing at the nape and peeled the layers back to reveal the pale flesh beneath. Then switched on the blade.

Across the temple floor, the others looked up involuntarily at the sound.

I stared back, and they looked away.

Under my hands, the top of Jad’s spine came out with a pair of deft slices and a brief levering motion. The smell that came with it wasn’t pleasant. I wiped the knife on her clothing and stowed it, examined the tissue-clogged vertebrae as I straightened up. Orr reached me with long strides and held out his hand.

“I’ll take that.”

I shrugged. “My pleasure. Here.”

“We’re all set.” Back at the satchel unit, Sylvie folded something closed with a gesture that reeked of finality. She stood up. “Ki, you want to do the honours?”

Kiyoka came and stood beside me, looking down at Jad’s mutilated corpse. There was a smooth grey egg in her hand. For what seemed like a long time, we all stood there in silence.

“Running short, Ki,” Lazlo said quietly.

Very gently, Kiyoka knelt at Jadwiga’s head and placed the grenade in the space I’d cut in her nape. As she got up again, something moved in her face.

Orr touched her gently on the arm.

“Be good as new,” he told her.

I looked at Sylvie. “So you guys want to share your plans now?”

“Sure.” The command head nodded at the satchel. “Escape clause. Datamine there blows in a couple of minutes, blips everybody’s comms and scanners out. Couple of minutes more, the noisy stuff goes up. Bits of Jad everywhere, then the house comes down. And we’re gone. Out the back door. Shielded drives, we can ride out the EMP pulse and by the time the sprogs get their scanners back on line we’ll be peripheral, invisible. They’ll find enough of Jad to make it look like we tripped a karakuri nest or a smart bomb and got vaporised in the blast. Leaving us free agents once more. Just the way we like it.”