The weight of the shard blaster and the bandolier of ultravibe mines tried to drag me under.

Did drag me under.

I flailed to the surface of the water, sucked for air, got half and half, went under again.

Get a grip, Kovacs.

Think.

Get a fucking GRIP.

I kicked for the surface, forced myself up and filled my lungs. Took a bearing on the rapidly receding wreck of the spider tank. Then I let myself be dragged down, reached for the bottom and grabbed hold.

The spines gripped. I found purchase with my feet as well, braced myself against the current and started to crawl across the river bed.

It took longer than I’d have liked.

In places the stones I chose were too small or too poorly embedded and they ripped loose. In other places, my boots couldn’t gouge enough purchase. I gave up seconds and metres of ground each time, flailed back again. Once I nearly lost the shard blaster. And anaerobic enhancement or not, I had to come up every three or four minutes for air.

But I made it.

After what seemed like an eternity of grabbing and rooting around in the stabbing, cramping cold, I stood up in waist-high water, staggered to the bank and hauled myself panting and shaking out of the river. For a couple of moments, it was all I could do to kneel there, coughing.

Rising machine hum.

I staggered to my feet, trying to hold the shard blaster somewhere close to still in both trembling hands. My teeth were chattering as if something had short circuited in my jaw muscles.

“Micky.”

Orr, seated astride one of the bugs, a long-barrelled Ronin of his own in one raised hand. Stripped to the waist, blast discharge vents still not fully

HP' " ' "tP? closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonised dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.

He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.

“Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.”

“I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—”

He nodded. “Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.”

“And sssssSylvie?”

He looked away.

TEN

“How is she?”

Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.

“Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.”

A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colours and motion. Recognisable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.

“That’s the command software?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright grey raged around her fingertip. “This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.”

I looked at the multicoloured tangle. “Lot of activity.”

“Yeah, far too much. Post run, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.” She shrugged again. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.

“What went wrong out there today, Ki?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an anti-viral that already knew our intrusion systems.”

“In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.”

“I know.”

“They say the stuff is evolving.” Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone.

Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. “Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—”

Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. “Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?”

“—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.” Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil.

“That’s black clinic software in there, and it’s going to eat Sylvie’s mind if we don’t find a blueprint for it. And that’s bad news, because the original architects are all back in fucking Millsport.”

“And that,” shouted Kiyoka, “is fucking bullshit.”

“Boy!” To my amazement, they both shut up and looked at me. “Uh, look. Las. I don’t see how even evolved software is going to map onto our particular systems just like that. I mean, what are the odds?”

“Because it’s the same people, Mick. Come on. Who writes the stuff for deCom? Who designed the whole deCom programme? And who’s buried to the fucking balls in developing secret black nanotech? The fucking Mecsek administration, that’s who.” Lazlo spread his hands, gave me a world-weary look. “You know how many reports there are, how many people I know, I’ve talked to, who’ve seen mimints there are no fucking archive descriptors for? This whole continent’s an experiment, man, and we’re just a little part of it. And the skipper there just got dumped in the rat’s maze.”

More movement at the door—Orr and Jadwiga, come to see what all the shouting was about. The giant shook his head.

“Las, you really got to buy yourself that turtle farm down in Newpest you’re always talking about. Go barricade yourself in there and talk to the eggs.”

“Fuck you, Orr.”

“No, fuck you, Las. This is serious.”

“She no better, Ki?” Jadwiga crossed to the monitor and dropped a hand on Kiyoka’s shoulder. Like mine, her new sleeve was grown on a standard Harlan’s World chassis. Mingled Slavic and Japanese ancestry made for savagely beautiful cheekbones, epicanthic folds to the pale jade eyes and a wide slash of a mouth. Combat biotech requirements hauled the body towards long-limbed and muscular, but the original gene stock brought it out at a curiously delicate ranginess. Skin tone was brown, faded out with tank pallor and five weeks of miserable New Hok weather.

Watching her cross the room was almost like walking past a mirror. We could have been brother and sister. Physically, we were brother and sister—the clone bank in the bunker ran to five different modules, a dozen sleeves grown off the same genetic stem in each. It had turned out easiest for Sylvie to hotwire only the one module.

Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with re-sleeves. The pheromonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.

“She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.” Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. “I just don’t know what’s going on in there.”

Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of colour in the coil.

“Ki.” I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister.

I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. “Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?”