I shook my head. “That is the worst fucking plan I have ever heard. What if—”

“Hey.” Orr gave me an unfriendly stare. “You don’t like it, you can fucking stay here.”

“Skipper,” Lazlo again, an edge in his voice this time. “Maybe instead of talking about this, we could just do it, you know? In the next two minutes? What do you reckon?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka glanced at Jadwiga’s sprawled corpse and then away.

“Let’s get out of here. Now.”

Sylvie nodded. The Slipins mounted up and we cruised in formation towards the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.

No one looked back.

EIGHT

As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.

We were a good five hundred metres the other side of the temple when it blew. There was a muffled series of detonations, and then a rumbling that built to a roar. I twisted in my seat—with Jadwiga now in Orr’s pocket instead of riding pillion, the view was unobstructed—and in the narrow frame of the street we had taken I saw the whole structure slump undramatically to the ground amidst a boiling cloud of dust. A minute later, an underpass took us below street level and I lost even that fractional view.

I rode level with the other two bugs

“You had this all mapped out?” I asked. “All the time, you knew this was what you were going to do?”

Sylvie nodded gravely in the dim light of the tunnel. Unlike the temple, here the effect was unintended. Decayed illuminum panelling overhead cast a last-gasp bluish glow over everything but it was less than you’d get on a triple-moon night with clear sky. Navigation lights sprang up on the bugs in response. The underpass angled right and we lost the wash of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel behind us. The air started to turn chilly.

“Been through here half a hundred times before,” drawled Orr. “That temple’s been a bolthole dream every time. Just we never had anyone to run away from before.”

“Yeah, well thanks for sharing.”

A ripple of deCom mirth in the blue gloom.

“Thing is,” Lazlo said. “Couldn’t really let you in on the loop without real-time auditory communication, and that’s clumsy. The skip clued us and cued us in about fifteen seconds through the crew net. You we would have had to tell, you know, with words. And the amount of state-of-the-art coms gear floating around the beachhead, no way to know who’s listening in.”

“We had no choice,” said Kiyoka.

“No choice,” echoed Sylvie. “Bodies burnt, and screaming skies and they tell me, I tell myself—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, guys. Fucking slippage again. Really got to get this sorted when we’re back south.”

I nodded back the way we’d come. “So how long before those guys get their scan systems back up?”

The deComs looked at each other. Sylvie shrugged.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, depends what failsafe software they had.”

“Too bad if the karakuri show up in the meantime, huh?”

Kiyoka snorted. Lazlo raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, that’s right,” rumbled Orr. “It’s too bad. Life in New Hok, better get used to it.”

“Anyway, look.” Kiyoka, patiently reasonable. “There are no bloody karakuri in Drava. They wouldn’t—”

Metallic flailing, up ahead.

Another taut exchange of glances. The weapons consoles on all three bugs lit across, tugged to readiness, presumably by Sylvie’s command-head override, and the little convoy jolted to a halt. Orr straightened up in his seat.

Ahead of us, an abandoned vehicle hulked in the gloom. No sign of movement. The frantic clashing sounds bounced past it from somewhere beyond the next bend in the tunnel.

Lazlo grinned tightly in the low light. “What were you saying, Ki?”

“Hey,” she said weakly. “I’m open to contrary evidence.”

The nailing stopped. Repeated.

“The fuck is that?” murmured Orr.

Sylvie’s face was unreadable. “Whatever it is, the datamine should have got it. Las, you want to start earning your wincefish pay?”

“Sure.” Lazlo winked at me and swung off his seat behind Kiyoka. He laced his fingers and pushed them outward until the knuckles cracked “You powered up there, big man?”

Orr nodded, already dismounting. He cracked the bug’s running-board storage space and dragged out a half-metre wrecking bar. Lazlo grinned again.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and stand well back. Scan up.”

And he was gone, loping along the curved wall of the tunnel, hugging the cover it offered until he reached the wrecked vehicle, then flitting sideways, seeming in the dim light to have no more substance than the shadow he cast. Orr stalked after him, a brutal apeman figure with the wrecking bar held low in his left hand. I glanced back to the bug where Sylvie sat crouched forward, eyes hooded, face blanked in the curious mix of intent and absent that signalled net engagement.

It was poetry to watch.

Lazlo grabbed part of the wreckage with one hand and hauled himself, monkey casual, up onto the vehicle’s roof. He froze into immobility, head cocked slightly. Orr hung back at the curve. Sylvie muttered inaudibly to herself, and Lazlo moved. A single leap, straight back to the floor of the tunnel and he landed running. Diagonally, across the curve towards something I couldn’t see. Orr stepped across, arms spread for balance, upper body held rigid facing the way the wincefish had gone. Another split second, a half-dozen rapid, deliberate steps forward and then he too was out of line of sight.

Seconds decayed. We sat and waited in the blue gloom.

Seconds decayed.

And—

“…so what the fuck is …?”

Sylvie’s voice, puzzled. Sliding up in volume as she emerged from the link-up and gave her real-world senses dominance again. She blinked a couple of times and looked sideways at Kiyoka.

The slight woman shrugged. Only now, I realised she’d been part of it, tuned into the ballet I’d just watched at standby, her body slightly stiff in the saddle of the bug while her eyes rode with the rest of the crew on Lazlo’s shoulder.

“Fucked if I know, Sylvie.”

“Alright.” The command head’s gaze turned on me. “Seems safe. Come on, let’s go have a look.”

We rode the bugs cautiously up around the bend in the tunnel and dismounted to stare at what Lazlo and Orr had found.

The kneeling figure in the tunnel was only humanoid in the vaguest terms. There was a head, mounted on the main chassis, but the only reason it bore resemblance to a man was that something had ripped the casing apart and left a more delicate structure beneath partially exposed. At the uppermost point, a wide bracing ring had survived, halo-like, to hover on a skeletal framework over the rest of the head.

It had limbs too, in approximately the positions you’d expect on a human being, but enough of them to suggest insect rather than mammalian life. On one side of the main body mass, two of the available four arms were inert, hanging limp and in one case scorched and shredded to scrap. On the other side, one limb had been torn entirely off, with massive damage to the surrounding body casing, and two more were clearly beyond useful function. They kept trying to flex but at every attempt, sparks ripped savagely across the exposed circuitry until the movement spasmed and froze. The flaring light threw spastic shadows on the walls.

It wasn’t clear if the thing’s four lower limbs were functional or not, but it didn’t try to get up as we approached. The three functioning arms merely redoubled their efforts to achieve something indefinable in the guts of the metal dragon laid out on the tunnel floor.

The machine had four powerful-looking side-mounted legs ending in clawed feet, a long, angular head full of multibarrelled ancillary weaponry, and a spiked tail that would gouge into the ground to give added stability.

It even had wings—a webbed framework of upward-curving launch cradles designed to take the primary missile load.