I couldn’t predict how that would work.
I’d never known it to happen before. Never even seen it before.
I couldn’t work out what she’d made me feel in turn.
And I wasn’t learning anything new looking at myself in the mirror.
I built a shrug and a grin, and walked out of the chamber into the pre-dawn gloom among the stilled machines. Wardani was waiting outside, by one of the open-rig webs and
Not alone.
The thought jarred through my soggy nervous system, painfully sluggish, and then the unmistakeable spike-and-ring configuration at the projection end of a Sunjet was pushed against the back of my neck.
‘You want to avoid any sudden moves, chum.’ It was a strange accent, an equatorial twang to it even through the voiceprint distorter. ‘Or you and your girlfriend here are going to be wearing no heads.’
A professional hand snaked round my waist, plucked the Kalashnikov from its resting place and tossed it away across the room. I heard the muffled clunk as it hit the carpeted floor and slid.
Try to pinpoint it.
Equatorial accent.
Kempists.
I looked over at Wardani, her oddly limp-hanging arms, and the figure who held a smaller hand blaster to her nape. He was dressed in the form-fitting black of a stealth assault suit and masked with clear plastic that moved in random waves over his face, distorting the features continually, except for two little watchful blue-tinted windows over the eyes.
There was a pack on his back that had to carry whatever intrusion hardware they’d used to get in here. Had to be a biosigns imaging set, counterfeed code sampler and securisys sandbagger in there, minimum.
High fucking tech.
‘You guys are so dead,’ I said, trying for amused calm.
‘Extra funny, chum.’ The one who’d taken me tugged at my arm and pulled me around so I was looking down the ramping chute of the Sunjet. Same dress code, same running plastic mask. Same black pack. Two more clone-identical forms bulked behind him, watching opposite ends of the room. Their Sunjets were cradled low, deceptively casual. My enthusiasm for the odds collapsed like a set of unplugged LED displays.
Play for time.
‘Who sent you guys?’
‘See,’ said the spokesman, voice squelching in and out of focus. ‘It’s rigged this way. Her we want, you’re just carbon walking. Limit that mouth, maybe we lift you too, just for tidiness. Keep gritting me, I’ll make a mess just to see your Envoy grey cells fly. Am I coming through?’
I nodded, desperately trying to mop up the post-coital languor that had drenched my system. Shifting my stance slightly…
Aligning from memory…
‘Good, then let’s have your arms.’ He dropped his left hand to his belt and produced a contact stunner. The aim of the Sunjet never wavered in the right-hand grip. The mask flexed in an approximation of a smile. ‘One at a time, of course.’
I raised my left arm and held it out to him. Flexed my right hand behind me, riding out the sense of impotent fury, so the palm rippled.
The little grey device came down on my wrist, charged light winking. He had to shift the Sunjet, of course, or the dead weight of my arm was going to come down on it like a club when the stunner fired…
Now. So low even the neurachem barely picked it out. A thin whine through the conditioned air.
The stunner fired.
Painless. Cold. A localised version of what it felt like to get shot with a beam stunner. The arm flopped like a dead fish, narrowly missing the Sunjet despite its new alignment. He twitched slightly aside, but it was a relaxed move. The mask grinned.
‘That’s good. Now the other one.’
I smiled and shot him—
Grav microtech – a weapons engineering breakthrough from the house of Kalashnikov.
—from the hip. Three times across the chest, hoping to drill clean through whatever armour he was wearing and into the backpack. Blood—
Across short distances, the Kalashnikov AKS91 interface gun will lift and fly direct to an implanted bioalloy home plate.
—drenched the stealth suit, tickled my face with backblown spray. He staggered, Sunjet wagging like an admonishing finger. His colleagues—
Almost silent, the generator delivers total capacity in a ten-second burst.
—hadn’t worked it out yet. I fired high at the two behind him, probably hit one of them somewhere. They rolled away, grabbing cover. Return fire crackled around me, nowhere close.
I came around, dragging the numbed arm like a shoulder bag, looking for Wardani and her captor.
‘Fucking don’t, man, I’ll—’
And shot through the writhing plastic of the mask.
The slug punched him back a clean three metres, into the spidery arms of a climbing machine, where he hung, slumped and used up.
Wardani dropped to the ground, bonelessly. I threw myself down, chased by fresh Sunjet fire. We landed nose to nose.
‘You OK?’ I hissed.
She nodded, cheek pressed flat to the floor, shoulders twitching as she tried to move her stunned arms.
‘Good. Stay there.’ I flailed my own numbed limb around and searched the machine jungle for the two remaining Kempists.
No sign. Could be fucking anywhere. Waiting for a clear shot.
Fuck this.
I lined up on the crumpled form of the squad leader, on the backpack. Two shots blew it apart, fragments of hardware jumping out of the exit holes in the fabric.
Mandrake security woke up.
Lights seared. Sirens shrieked from the roof, and an insectile storm of nanocopters issued from vents on the walls. They swooped over us, blinked glass bead eyes and passed us by. A few metres over, a flight of them rained laser fire down amidst the machines.
Screams.
An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.
Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.
The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.
Silence.
Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her, but could not get upright. No upper body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.
‘Stay there. I’ll be back.’
I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.
The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiralled up.
‘Oh, shit.’
I ran back to the one I’d shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine’s struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I’d put in the centre of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.
‘Fuck.’
‘Kovacs.’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.