I came up off the ground and flung myself at her companion.

It was a clumsy fight, both of us hampered by the weapons we held. I lunged with the butt of the Szeged, he blocked and tried to level his own blaster. I smashed it aside and kicked at a knee. He turned the blow with a shin-kick of his own. I got the Szeged butt under his chin and rammed upward. He dropped his weapon and punched me hard simultaneously in the side of the throat and the groin. I reeled back, hung on somehow to the Szeged and suddenly had the distance to use it. Proximity sense screamed a warning at me through the pain. The commando ripped out a sidearm and pointed it. I flinched aside, ignoring the pain and the proximity warning in my head, levelled the blaster.

Sharp splatter from the gun in the commando’s hand. The cold wrap of a stunblast.

My hand spasmed open and the Szeged clattered away somewhere.

I staggered backwards and the floor vanished under my feet.

—fucking Martian builders—

I dropped out of the eyrie like a bomb, and fell wingless away from the rapidly contracting iris of my own consciousness.

EIGHTEEN

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.”

It was like a mantra, like an incantation, and someone seemed to have been singing it to me for hours. I wasn’t sure if I could have disobeyed it anyway—my left arm was an icy branch of numbness from fist to shoulder and my eyes seemed gummed shut. My shoulder felt wrenched, maybe dislocated. Elsewhere, my body throbbed with the more general ache of a stunblast hangover. I was cold everywhere.

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t—”

“I heard you the first time, Dig.” My throat felt clogged. I coughed and an alarming dizziness swung through me. “Where am I?”

A brief hesitation. “Professor Serendipity, perhaps that information would be better dealt with later. Don’t open your left hand.”

“Yeah, got it. Left hand, don’t open it. Is it fucked?”

“No,” said the construct reluctantly. “Apparently not. But it is the only thing holding you up.”

Shock, like a stake in the chest. Then the rolling wave of false calm as the conditioning kicked in. Envoys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing—waking up in unexpected places is part of the brief. You don’t panic, you just gather data and deal with the situation. I swallowed hard.

“I see.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred metres of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.

The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-grey alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.

“What’s going on, Dig?” I croaked.

“As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.”

“Recovery bay?” I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. “So how does that work?”

“We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—”

“Alright.” I stared grimly up at my closed fist. “How long have I been out?”

“Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high altitude, high-risk environments.”

No shit.

How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me.

They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realisation of the fall. Grabbing at something half-seen as the stun blast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.

A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.

“Where are the others?”

“They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.”

“So they think I fell all the way.”

“It appears so. The man you referred to as Kovacs has detailed some of his employees to begin a search at the base of the mountain. I understand they will try to recover your body along with that of the woman you mutilated in the firefight.”

“And Sylvie? My colleague?”

“They have taken her with them. I have recorded footage of—”

“Not right now.” I cleared my throat, noticing for the first time how parched it felt. “Look, you said there are openings. Ways back into the eyrie from here. Where’s the nearest?”

“Behind the triflex downspire to your left, there is an entry port of ninety-three centimetres diameter.”

I craned my neck and spotted what I assumed Dig 301 was talking about. The downspire looked very much like a two-metre inverted witch’s hat that massive fists had crumpled badly in three different places. It was surfaced in uneven bluish facets that caught the shadowed light beneath the eyrie and gleamed as if wet. The lowest deformation brought its tip almost horizontal and offered a saddle of sorts that I thought I might be able to cling to. It was less than two metres from where I hung.

Easy. Nothing to it.

If you can make the jump with one arm crippled, that is.

If your trick hand grips better on Martian alloy than it did an hour ago upstairs.

I reached up with my right arm and took hold of the loop of cable, close to my other hand. Very gently, I took up the tension and began to lift myself on the new grip. My left arm twinged as the weight came off it, and a jagged flash of heat spiked through the numbness. My shoulder creaked.

The heat branched out across abused ligaments and started turning into something resembling pain. I tried to flex my left hand, but got nothing outside from a sparking sensation in the fingers. The pain in my shoulder swelled and began to soak down through the muscles of the arm. It felt as if, when it finally got going, it was going to hurt a lot.

I tried again with the fingers of my left hand. This time the sparking gave way to a bone-deep, pulsing ache that brought tears squirting into my eyes. The fingers would not respond. My grip was welded in place.

“Do you wish me to alert emergency services?”

Emergency services: the Tekitomura police, closely followed by deCom security with tidings of Kurumaya’s displeasure, tipped-off local yakuza with the new me at their grinning head and who knew, maybe even the Knights of the New Revelation, if they could afford the police bribes and had been keeping up on current events.

“Thanks,” I said weakly. “I think I’ll manage.”

I glanced up at my clamped left hand, back at the triflex downspire, down at the drop. I drew a long hard breath. Then, slowly, I worked my right hand along the cable until it was touching its locked-up mate.