“I am already about it.”

Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley towards us, heat-seeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted.

The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-metre drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.

Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared.

Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were—came equipped with gekkogene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could—assuming I actually fucking wanted to—scramble up a hundred metres of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly-tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain.

Jadwiga, re-sleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an ear-splitting whoop as she discovered the genentech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.

Personally, I don’t like heights.

On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.

I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew.

Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it—they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographies and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.

The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked up vision. Still a kilometre off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line of sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earnt the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.

I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig.

“Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.”

“Take it easy, Micky,” she drawled back. “I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation either. Programmed parameters. Remember that.”

A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background.

On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.

Sylvie sighed. “So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement?

All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armour, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November 17th Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?”

“Who the fuck cares?” echoed Jadwiga.

“We would have,” I pointed out. “If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.”

It was unfair—if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

“Correct!” she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centres in the brain spewing an analogue of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio- phone link. “Correct your flicking parameters.”

The shell hit.

Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then—nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshalled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

“…our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has …”

Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake, and called me a liar.

A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.

“Here we go, people.” A sharp whisper, for Jadwiga’s and my benefit.

The rest would already know, advised on the internal net in less time than it takes to form a conscious human thought. “Through the primary baffles. Move on my command.”

The self-propelled gun was past the little huddle of prefabs now. Lazlo and Kiyoka had taken up positions close to the river not two kilometres downstream of the base. The karakuri advance guard had to be almost on top of them by now. The undergrowth and long silver grass along the valley twitched in a dozen places with their passing. The rest kept pace with the bigger machines.

“Now!”

Fire bloomed, pale and sudden amidst the trees downstream. Orr, cutting loose against the first of the mech puppets.

“Go! Go!”

The lead spider tank staggered slightly in the water. I was already moving, a route down the rock I’d mapped out a couple of dozen times while I was waiting under the overhang. Cascading seconds, the Eishundo sleeve took over and put my hands and feet in place with engineered poise.