He’d strapped his healing arm with a combat servosplint and didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. I caught the blast of alcohol on his breath.

“Okay?”

He nodded. “Anyone who’s interested, and a few who probably weren’t, now knows Kurumaya’s got us locked down. Jad’s still in there, being loudly pissed off to anyone who’ll listen.”

“Oishii? You set?”

The command head regarded me gravely. “If you are. Like I said, you’ll have five minutes max. All I can do without leaving traces.”

“Five minutes is fine,” said Lazlo impatiently.

Everybody looked at Sylvie. She managed a wan smile under the scrutiny.

“Fine,” she echoed. “Scan up. Let’s do it.”

Oishii’s face took on the abrupt inwardness of net time. He nodded minutely to himself.

“They’re running the navigational systems at standby. Drives and systems test in two hundred and twenty seconds. You’d better be in the water by the time it kicks in.”

Sylvie scraped up some hollow-eyed professional interest and a stifled cough.

“Hull security?”

“Yeah, it’s on. But the stealth suits should throw back most of the scan. And when you get down to water level, I’m going to pass you off as a couple of ripwings waiting for easy fish in the wake turbulence. Soon as the system test cycle starts, get up that chute. I’ll vanish you on the internal scanners, and the navgear will assume it lost the rips in the wake. Same for you coming out, Lazlo. So stay in the water until she’s well down the estuary.”

“Great.”

“You get us a cabin?” I asked.

The corner of Oishii’s mouth twitched. “Of course. No luxury spared for our fugitive friends. Starboard lower are mostly empty, S37 is all yours. Just push.”

“Time to go,” hissed Lazlo. “One at a time.”

He flitted out of the cover of the container with the same accomplished wincefish lope I’d seen deployed in the Uncleared, was a moment exposed to view along the quay and then swung himself lithely off the edge of the wharf and was gone again. I glanced sideways at Sylvie and nodded.

She went, less smoothly than Lazlo, but still with an echo of the same grace. I thought I heard a faint splash this time. I gave her five seconds and followed, across the blizzard-shrouded open space, crouch to grab the top rung of the inspection ladder and down, hand over rapid hand, to the chemical stink of the estuary below. When I was immersed to the waist I let go and fell back into the water.

Even through the stealth suit and the clothes I wore over it, the shock of entry was savage. The cold stabbed through, clutched at my groin and chest and forced the air out of my lungs through gritted teeth. The gekkogrip cells in my palms flexed their filaments in sympathy. I drew in a fresh breath and cast about in the water for the others.

“Over here.”

Lazlo gestured from a corrugated section of the dock where he and Sylvie were clinging to a corroded cushioning generator. I slipped through the water towards them and let my genentech hands grip me directly to the evercrete. Lazlo breathed in jerkily and spoke through chattering teeth.

“Get ttto the stttern and tttread water between the dock and the hull. You’ll sssee the launchers. Dddddon’t dddrink the water, eh.”

We traded clenched grins and kicked off.

It was hard work, swimming against a body reflex that wanted nothing more than to curl up tight against the cold and shudder. Before we’d gone halfway, Sylvie was falling behind and we had to go back for her. Her breath was coming in harsh bursts, her teeth were gritted and her eyes were starting to roll.

“Cccan’t hold it tttogether,” she muttered as I turned in the water and Lazlo helped haul her onto my chest. “Dddon’ttt tell me we’re whu-whuwwinning, whu-winning fffucking whwhat?”

“Be okay,” I managed through my own clamped jaws. “Hold on. Las, you keep going.”

He nodded convulsively and flailed off. I struck out after him, awkward with the burden on my chest.

“Is there no other fucking choice?” she moaned, barely above a whisper.

Somehow I got us both to the rising bulk of the Daikoku Dawn’s stern where Lazlo was waiting. We paddled round into the crevice of water between the ‘loader’s hull and the dock and I slapped a hand against the evercrete wall to steady myself.

“Llless thththan a mmminute,” said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. “Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.”

The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.

“Up there,” he yelled over the engine noise.

I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chainlink inspection ladder up the loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.

The note of the engines deepened, settling down.

Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and onto the scant, down curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie towards the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top and after some maneuvering the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.

A couple of metres above me, I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him—a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found

I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum and got moving again.

At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.

“This is it.” He thumped the yielding surface above his head. “This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawlspace between levels. Just pop the nearest access, panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.”

We worked the canvasynth raft back from one edge of the hatchway and warm, stale air gusted through into the chute. I laughed with sheer involuntary pleasure at the feel of it. Lazlo nodded sourly.

“Yeah, enjoy. Some of us are going back in the fucking water now.”

Sylvie squeezed through and I was about to follow, when the wincefish tugged at my arm. I turned back. He hesitated.

“Las? Come on, man, we’re running out of time.”

“You.” He lifted a warning finger. “I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her. You keep her safe ‘til we can get to you. ‘til she’s back online.”

“Alright.”

“I’m trusting you,” he repeated.

Then he turned, unlatched his hold on the hatch and was sliding rapidly down the curve of the launcher chute. As he disappeared at the bottom, I heard a faint whoop come floating back up.

I stared after him for what seemed like far too long, then turned and forced my way irritably through the canvasynth barrier between myself and my newly acquired responsibilities.