It was dead.

Something had torn huge parallel gashes in the left flank and the legs below the damage had collapsed. The launch cradles were twisted out of alignment and the head was wrenched to one side.

“Komodo launcher,” said Lazlo, skirting the tableau warily. “And karakuri caretaker unit. You lose, Ki.”

Kiyoka shook her head. “Doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s it doing down here? What’s it fucking doing, come to that?”

The karakuri cocked its head at her. Its functional limbs crept out of the gash in the dragon’s body and hovered over the damage in a gesture that looked weirdly protective.

“Repairs?” I suggested.

Orr barked a laugh. “Yeah. Karakuri are caretakers to a point. After that, they turn scavenger. Something this badly hit, they’d dismember it for a co-op cluster to make into something new. Not try and repair it.”

“And that’s another thing.” Kiyoka gestured around. “The mech puppets don’t get out that much on their own. Where’s the rest of them? Sylvie, you’re getting nothing, right?”

“Nothing.” The command head looked up and down the tunnel pensively.

Blue light glinted off strands of silver in her hair. “This is all there is.”

Orr hefted his wrecking bar. “So we going to switch it off or what?”

“Worth fuck-all bounty anyway,” grumbled Kiyoka. “Even if we could claim it, which we can’t. Why not just leave it for the sprogs to find?”

“I am not,” said Lazlo, “walking the rest of this tunnel with that thing still on ops behind me. Turn it off, big man.”

Orr looked questioningly at Sylvie. She shrugged and nodded.

The wrecking bar swung. Inhumanly swift, into the eggshell remnants of the karakuri’s head. Metal grated and tore. The halo ripped loose, bounced on the tunnel floor and rolled away into the shadows. Orr pulled the bar clear and swung again. One of the machine’s arms came up, fending—the bar flattened it into the ruins of the head. Eerily silent, the karakuri struggled to rise on lower limbs that I now saw were irretrievably mangled. Orr grunted, lifted one booted foot and stomped down hard.

The machine went over, thrashing at the damp tunnel air. The giant moved in, wielding the bar with the economical savagery of experience.

It took a while.

When he was done, when the sparks had bled dry amidst the wreckage at his feet, Orr straightened and wiped his brow. He was breathing hard.

He glanced at Sylvie again.

“That do?”

“Yeah, it’s off.” She went back to the bug they were sharing. “Come on, we’d better get cracking.”

As we all mounted up again, Orr caught me watching him. He flexed his brows good-naturedly at me and puffed out his cheeks.

“Hate it when you’ve got to do them by hand,” he said. “Specially after just paying out all that cred on new blaster upgrades.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s tough.”

“Ah, be better when we hit the Uncleared, you’ll see. Plenty of room to deploy the hardware, no need to hide the splash. Still.” He pointed at me with the wrecking bar. “If we do have to do another by hand, you’re aboard now. You can turn off the next one.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, no big deal.” He handed the bar back over his shoulder to Sylvie, who stowed it. The bug quivered under his hands and drifted forward, past the wreckage of the fallen karakuri. The flexed brows again, and a grin.

“Welcome to deCom, Micky.”

PART 2

THIS IS SOMEONE ELSE

NINE

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang.

A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty metres below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.

“Leave us alone,” it repeated. “And we’ll do you the same favour.”

“Can’t do that.” Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. “You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.”

“Yeah.” Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. “And besides which, we want the fucking land.”

“The essence of empowerment,” said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, “is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonwealth economic constitution…”

“You are the aggressors here.” The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. “We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.”

Kiyoka snorted. “Oh, come off it.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” rumbled Orr.

It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems, and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge.

Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.

So, after a fashion, had I.

“…those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic …”

Drone’s the right flicking word.

I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards—there was, for example no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves—but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.

“…in a struggle that has surfaced again and again in every place the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—”

Movement.

Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength—Sylvie had estimated the coop’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.

“Then you leave me no choice,” it said. “I shall be forced to neutralise your incursion with immediate effect.”

“Yeah,” said Lazlo through a yawn. “You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.”