Another breath and I hinged my body upward from the waist. Barely recovered nerve tissue in my stomach muscles sputtered protest. I hooked with my right foot, missed, flailed and hooked again. My ankle lodged over the cable. More weight came off my left arm. The pain began in earnest, racking explosions through the joints and down the muscles.

One more breath, one more glance d—

No, don’t fucking look down.

One more breath, teeth gritted.

Then I began, with thumb and forefinger, to unhinge my paralysed fingers one at a time from the cable.

I left the swooping bluish gloom of the eyrie’s interior half an hour later, still on the edge of a persistent manic giggle. The adrenalin humour stayed with me all the way along the cantilever arm, down the shaky archaeologue ladder—not easy with one arm barely functional—then the steps. I hit solid ground still smirking stupidly, and picked my way between the cabins with ingrained caution and tiny explosive snorts of hilarity. Even when I got back to the cabin we’d used, even inside and staring at the empty bed I’d left Sylvie in, I could feel the trace of the comedown grin twitching on and off my lips and the laughter still bubbled faintly in my stomach.

It had been a close thing.

Ungripping my fingers from the cable hadn’t been much fun, but compared with the rest of the escapade, it was a joy. Once released, my left arm dropped and hung at the end of a shoulder socket that ached like a bad tooth. It was as much use to me as a dead weight slung around my neck. A sustained minute of cursing before I could bring myself to then unsling my right foot, swing free by my right hand and use the momentum to make an ungainly leap sideways at the downspire. I grabbed, clawed, found that the Martians for once had built in a material that offered something approaching decent friction and clamped myself panting into the saddle at the bottom. I stayed like that for a good ten minutes, cheek pressed to the cold alloy.

Careful exploratory leaning and peering showed me the floor hatch Dig 301 had promised, within grasping distance if I stood up on the tip of the downspire. I flexed my left arm, got some response above the elbow and reckoned it might serve, if nothing else, as a wedge in the hatch. From that position, I could probably lever my legs up and inside.

Another ten minutes and I was sweatily ready to try.

A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.

Nothing to it.

Eventually, I got up and made my way out.

In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared, there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder.

The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.

There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.

On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia.

Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.

In too much of a hurry.

Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?

I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.

I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.

I wondered what he would do.

I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.

“Dig?”

She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.

“Professor Serendipity?”

“You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?”

“Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic metres of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—”

“Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.”

“Commencing.”

I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.

“And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.”

He had a good body.

I skipped about in the footage for the best shots, got one as the intruders came up the mountain path towards the cabin. Froze it on him and stared for a while. He had some of the bulk you expect from battlefield custom, but there was a lilt to it, a way of stepping and standing that leaned more towards Total Body theatre than combat. Face a smooth blend of more racial variants than you’d usually get on Harlan’s World. Custom cultured, then. Gene codes bought in from offworld. Skin tanned the colour of worn amber, eyes a startling blue. Broad, protruding cheekbones, a wide, full-lipped mouth and long, crinkled black hair bound back with a static braid. Very pretty.

And very pricey, even for the yakuza.

I quelled the faint scratching of disquiet and got Dig 301 to pan about a bit among the intruders. Another figure caught my eye. Tall and powerful, rainbow-maned. The site microcams yanked in a close-up of steel lensed eyes and subcutaneous circuitry in a grim, pale face.

Anton.

Anton and at least a couple of slim wincefish types who preceded him up the path with the loose, in-step co-ordination of deCom operational pitch.

One of them was the woman whose foot I’d shot off in the eyrie. Two, no three, more came behind the command head, standing out clearly from the rest of the party now that I was looking for that characteristic scattered but meshed pattern.

Somewhere in me, a faint grey sense of loss readied itself for recognition at the sight.

Anton and the Skull Gang

Kovacs had brought his New Hok hunting dogs back with him.

I thought back to the confusion of the firelight amidst the cabins and the eyrie, and it made some more sense. A boatload of yakuza enforcers and a deCom crew, mingled and getting in each other’s way. Very poor logistics for an Envoy. No way I would have made that mistake at his age.

What are you talking about? You just did make that mistake at his age. That’s you out there.

A faint shiver coiled down my spine.

“Dig, move it up to the bedroom again. Where they pull her out.”

The coil jumped and shimmered. The woman with the tangled hyper wired hair blinked awake among twisted sheets. The crash of gunfire outside had woken her. Eyes wide as she registered what it was. Then the door burst open and the room filled with bulky forms brandishing hardware and yelling. When they saw what they had, the shouting powered down to chuckles. Weapons were put up and someone reached for her.

She punched him in the face. A brief struggle flared and guttered out as weight of numbers squashed her speed reflexes. Sheets torn away, efficient disabling blows administered to thigh and solar plexus. While she wheezed on the floor, one grinning thug grabbed at a breast, groped between her legs and made pumped-hip rutting motions over her. A couple of his companions laughed.

I was seeing it for the second time. Still, the rage leapt up through me like flames. In my palms, the gekko spines sweated awake.