I pushed out a long breath.

"Well. Sutjiadi." I looked at ground and sky in turn. "You'd better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a s.h.i.thole, of course, but it's where we're from. We sure as h.e.l.l belong there there."

He smiled a little, rearguard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.

"It's too late for that," he said quietly. "Much too late for that."

Down by the Nagini Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device's ability to do the job.

"Look," said Hansen irritably, as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. "It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it's patterned the trace, there's nothing short of a dark body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there's no problem."

"That isn't impossible," Hand told him. "Run the ma.s.s detector backup again. Make sure it fires up on deployment."

Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-metre buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini Nagini's hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.

"All ready for the Big Deep," he said.

With the launch cradle a.s.sembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping's help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then round in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it and yawned.

"Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?" he asked.

I checked my retinal time display, where I'd synchronised a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy's nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.

"Oh for Samedi's sake," said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. "Well don't just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me-"

She ripped apart.

I was closest, already turning to answer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upwards in a careless back-and-forth scribble and tossed the pieces skywards in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of total body gymnast's trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.

I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word no no, torn loose of its meaning.

Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.

I could see Yells from the Nagini Nagini.

the thing Someone cut loose with a blaster.

that did it.

Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of a half dozen, pale grey and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.

They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.

The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen trod past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.

"Get back!" I screamed at him. "Get the f.u.c.k back!"

The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.

Too late.

Hansen must have thought he was up against armouring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He'd spread his beam to beat the latter and was closing to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporises.

The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to gla.s.s in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.

I walked in, firing.

The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometre precision.

Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

I emptied both guns.

They spat out their magazines and gaped open, eagerly. I pounded the b.u.t.ts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun b.u.t.ts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chefs knife.

I emptied again.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank's head looking up at me.

It had fallen face up on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she was going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

I dropped my arms. The bar.

My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me. In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side. "Get me a corrosion grenade," I said, and my voice was unrecognisable in my own ears.

The Nagini Nagini held station, three metres above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems. held station, three metres above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the Nagini's holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand's insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor panels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of- Stop that.

Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation and deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser sealed at the neck and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human shaped.

Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nan.o.bes cannibalised anything non-organic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank's weapons either.

I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nan.o.be cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping's microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

"Take a look." Sun glanced round at me, and cleared her throat. "It's what you said."

"Then I don't need to look."

"You're saying these are the nan.o.bes?" asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. "Not-"

"The gate isn't even f.u.c.king open, Sutjiadi." I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

Sun peered again into the microscope's screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.

"It's an interlocking configuration," she said. "But the components don't actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It's like a, I don't know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nan.o.be generates a portion of the field and that's what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just pa.s.ses through it. It might vaporise a few individual nan.o.bes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that's not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing's organic."

Hand looked down at me curiously. "You knew this?"

I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.

I made an effort to hold it down.

"I worked it out. In the firefight." I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me too. "Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don't work, because we've already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They've evolved to beat it, and now they've got conferred immunity to beam weapons."

"And the ultravibe?" Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.

She shook her head. "I've pa.s.sed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nan.o.bes resonate inside the field, but it doesn't damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam."

"Solid ammunition's the only thing that works," said Hand thoughtfully.

"Yeah, and not for much longer." I got up to leave. "Give them some time, they'll evolve past that too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later."

"Where are you going, Kovacs?"

"If I were you, Hand, I'd get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they're likely to start growing longer arms."

I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch to his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank's Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three metres below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.

I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.

Cruickshank flickered through my head. Grinning, focused on a task, smoking, in the throes of o.r.g.a.s.m, shredded into the sky- Stop that.

I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.

"Kovacs." He crouched to my level and started again. "Kovacs, I am sorry. She was a fine sol-"

The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backwards with the shock.

"Shut up up Jiang." I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. "You say one more Jiang." I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. "You say one more f.u.c.king f.u.c.king word and I'll paint Luc with your brains." word and I'll paint Luc with your brains."

I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung onto it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.

One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There'd been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.

From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn't muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.

Did I not tell you there was work for me here?

I closed my eyes.

Where is my antipersonnel round, Wedge Wolf? Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it?

I don't- Are you looking for me now?