"OK, that's it." I dialled down to intake standard. "Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit's malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern."

The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

"Try to stay alive, Luc."

I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night-five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok's hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she'd never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn't identify.

Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

They spotted me at twenty metres-I wasn't hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.

"Lieutenant?"

I shot her first. A single shot, in through the opened faceplate. The detonating plasma core blew the helmet apart as I ran forward.

-aching throatful of wolf loyalty, rubbed raw- The second suit was moving when I got to him, a single leap in the mob suit and a mid-air kick that slammed him back against the carapace of the bug. He bounced off, one hand reaching to slap his faceplate closed. I grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired down into his yelling mouth.

Something hammered me in the chest, threw me on my back in the sand. I saw an unsuited figure stalking towards me, hand gun flung out. The interface gun dragged my arm up a handsbreadth and I shot his legs out from under him. Finally, a scream to compete with Sutjiadi, and time running out. I chinned my faceplate closed and flexed my legs. The mob suit threw me to my feet again. A Sunjet blast lashed the sand where I had been. I tracked round and snapped off a shot. The Sunjet wielder spun about with the impact and red glinting fragments of spine exploded out of his back as the sh.e.l.l detonated.

The last one tried to close with me, blocking my gun arm upward and stamping down at my knee. Against an unarmoured man, it was a good move, but he hadn't been paying attention. The edge of his foot bounced off the mob suit and he staggered. I twisted and snapped out a roundhouse kick with all the balanced force the suit would give me.

It broke his back.

Something banged off the front of the bug. I looked down the beach and saw figures spilling from the makeshift amphitheatre, weapons levelling. I snapped a shot off in reflex, then got a grip on my 'meth-scrambled thought processes and straddled the bug.

The systems awoke at a slap to the ignition pad-lights and dataflow in the hooded and heavily armoured instrument panels. I powered up, lifted a quarter-turn about to face the advancing Wedge, selected weaponry and- -howl, howl, HOWL- some kind of snarling grin made it to my face as the launchers cut loose.

Explosives aren't good for much in vacuum combat. No shockwave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.

The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub sh.e.l.ls into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-sized razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.

It was the weapon that ripped 391 platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok's eyes, Eddie Munharto's limbs, and my shoulder.

Two months? Why does it feel like another lifetime Why does it feel like another lifetime?

The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turned from men and women into shredded carca.s.ses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those further off just died in sudden pieces.

The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air, and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra's Virtue Angin Chandra's Virtue and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field. and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field.

There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.

I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.

Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.

"What-" he pleaded.

The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some h.e.l.l I hadn't heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half levelled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the sh.o.r.eline beside Sutjiadi's impromptu funeral pyre, and picked out motion at the water's edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured-he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug's screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.

"Who?" he kept saying. "Who?"

He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.

"Lieutenant Kovacs?" His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. "Who did this?"

"We did," I told him, knowing he couldn't hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.

I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.

Movement from the 'Chandra.

I whipped about on the bug and saw a polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry rank and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug's screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit's gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was ma.s.sive.

The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.

"Carrera," he managed hoa.r.s.ely. "Forward hatch."

I was already moving, already knowing bone-deep I was too late.

The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three metres from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.

f.u.c.k you, Isaac, f.u.c.k you for a diehard motherf.u.c.ker.

I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a f.u.c.king thing. The locker room was as I'd left it. The female noncom's corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.

I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.

f.u.c.k.

Well, it figures. I shut down the shower system absently. What did you expect, that he'd be easy to kill What did you expect, that he'd be easy to kill?

I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.

Deprez died while I was gone.

When I got back to him, he'd given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood-at close range, a Sunjet cauterises totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had got him point blank.

Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were knelt in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn't in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in pa.s.sing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.

"Tanya."

She heard it in my voice. "What now?"

"It's a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?"

"Right." She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. "There's a shutdown procedure that doesn't require encoding, yes. How did you know?"

I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn't usually work this way. "Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterwards."

Her voice lowered. "Yes."

"This shutdown. How long will it take?"

"I, f.u.c.k f.u.c.k, Kovacs. I don't know. A couple of hours. Why?"

"Carrera isn't dead."

She coughed up a fractured laugh. "What?"

"You see that big f.u.c.king hole in Luc." The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. "Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy and is by now on the other side of the f.u.c.king gate. That clear enough for you?"

"Then why don't you leave him there?"

"Because if I do," I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the 'meth surge. "If I do, he'll swim up while you're trying to close the gate and he'll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead. Very Very shortly." shortly."

"Then why don't we just get the f.u.c.k out of here right now?" asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the Angin Chandra's Virtue Angin Chandra's Virtue. "In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. f.u.c.k it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months."

I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.

"No. We have to close the gate."

Vongsavath threw up her hands. "What the f.u.c.k for? Who care-"

"Stow it, Ameli." I flexed the suit upright again. "Tell the truth, I don't think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I'm afraid we're going to have to do this the hard way."

And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.

I wasn't sure if that was the 'meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whisky on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn't seem to matter that much.

Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.

"You going on the bug?" she asked. "Or do you want an impeller frame?"

"We'll need both."

"Yeah?" she looked suddenly interested. "How come? Do you want me-"

"The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty kiloton yield. I'm going to fire that motherf.u.c.ker across and see if we can't fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won't. He'll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I'll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that," I shrugged. "It's a fair fight."

"And I suppose I'm not-"

"Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?"

"Around here?" she looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. "It feels out of place."

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.

You can't do this," said Wardani quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre of the gate-s.p.a.ce, and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

"Tanya, we've seen this thing withstand weapons that..." I searched for adequate words. "That I for one don't understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?"

"I don't mean that. I mean you. Look at you."

I looked down at controls on the firing board. "I'm good for a couple more days."

"Yeah-in a hospital bed. Do you you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you're in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit." really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you're in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit."

"Rubbish. You're forgetting the tetrameth."

"Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?"

"Long enough." I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. "What the h.e.l.l is keeping Vongsavath?"

"Kovacs." She waited until I looked at her. "Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I'll get the gate closed."

"Tanya, why didn't you shoot me with the stunner?"

Silence.

"Tanya?"

"Alright," she said violently. "p.i.s.s your f.u.c.king life away out there. See if I care." your f.u.c.king life away out there. See if I care."

"That wasn't what I asked you."

"I," she dropped her gaze. "I panicked."

"That, Tanya, is bulls.h.i.t. I've seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn't been any of them. I don't think you know the meaning of the word."

"Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?"

"Well enough."

She snorted. "f.u.c.king soldiers. Show me a soldier, I'll show you a f.u.c.ked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You've f.u.c.ked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge judge people?" people?"

"People like Schneider, you mean?" I shrugged. "He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don't you. He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen."