Something exploded at my back and the impeller thrust cut out. Scorching heat across my back. Carrera and his fucking VacCom skills. But with the residual velocity, and well, maybe a little spirit realm luck cadged off the vengeful ghost of Hand – he shot you after all, Matt, you did curse the fucker – just to grease the palm of whatever fate…
I ploughed through the atmosphere baffles of the docking bay at a slewed angle, found gravity beneath me and battered into one of the stacked fat-snake containing walls, bounced off with the sudden shock of weight from the grav field and crashed to the deck, trailing wings of smoke and flame from the wrecked impeller frame.
For a long moment, I lay still in the cavernous quiet of the bay.
Then, from somewhere, I heard a curious bubbling sound in my helmet. It took me several seconds to realise I was laughing.
Get up, Takeshi.
Oh, come on…
He can kill you just as dead in here, Tak. Get UP.
I reached out and tried to prop myself up. Wrong arm – the broken elbow joint bent soggily inside the mob suit. Pain ran up and down the abused muscles and tendons. I rolled away, gasping and tried with the other arm. Better. The mob suit wheezed a little, something definitely awry in the works here, but it got me up. Now get rid of the wreckage on my back. The emergency release still worked, sort of. I hauled myself clear, the Sunjet caught in the frame and would not tug loose on the tether line. I yanked at it for a senseless moment, then unseamed the tether instead and bent to free the weapon from the other side.
‘Alri… vacs.’ Carrera’s voice, trampled out by the interference from the interior structure. ‘If… tha… ay… ant it.’
He was coming in after me.
The Sunjet stuck.
Leave it!
And fight him with a pistol? In polalloy?
Weapons are an extension screamed an exasperated Virginia Vidaura, in my head – you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. Leave it!
’kay, Virginia. I sniggered a little. Whatever you say.
I lurched away towards the lintel-braced exit from the bay, drawing the interface pistol from its pouch. Wedge equipment was crated and stacked across the bay. The locater beacon, dumped unceremoniously, still powered at standby, the way Carrera had presumably left it. A nearby crate cracked open, sections of a disassembled Philips launcher protruding. Haste written into the details of the scene, but it was a soldierly haste. Controlled speed. Combat competence, a man at his trade. Carrera was in his element.
Get the fuck out of here, Tak.
Into the next chamber. Martian machines stirred, bristled and then sloped sullenly away from me, muttering to themselves. I limped past them, following the painted arrows, no, don’t fucking follow the arrows. I ducked left at the next opportunity and plunged along a corridor the expedition had not taken before. A machine snuffled after me a few paces, then went back.
I thought I heard the sound of motion behind and above me. A jerked glance up into the shadowed space overhead. Ludicrous.
Get a grip, Tak. It’s the ’meth. You did too much and now you’re hallucinating.
More chambers, intersecting curves one into another and always the space above. I stopped myself rigidly from looking up. The pain from the grenade shards in my leg and shoulder was beginning to seep up through the chemical armour of the tetrameth, waking echoes in my ruined left hand and the shattered joint in my right elbow. The furious energy I’d felt earlier had decayed to a jumpy sense of speed and vibrating riffs of inexplicable amusement that threatened to emerge as giggling.
In that state, I backed through into a tight, closed chamber, turned about and came face to face with my last Martian.
This time, the mummified wing membranes were folded down around the skeletal frame, and the whole thing was crouched on a low roost bar. The long skull drooped forward over the chest, hiding the light gland. The eyes were closed.
It lifted its beak and looked up at me.
No. It fucking didn’t.
I shook my head, crept closer to the corpse and stared at it. From somewhere, an impulse arose to caress the long bone ridge on the back of the skull.
‘I’ll just sit here for a while,’ I promised, stifling another giggle. ‘Quietly. Just a couple of hours, that’s all I need.’
I lowered myself to the floor on my uninjured arm, leaned against the sloping wall behind us, clutching the interface gun like a charm. My body was a warm twisting together of limp ropes inside the cage of the mob suit, a faintly quivering assemblage of soft tissue with no more will to animate its exoskeleton. My gaze slipped up into the gloomy space at the top of the chamber and for a while I thought I saw pale wings beating there, trying to escape the imprisoning curve. At some point, though, I spotted the fact that they were in my head, because I could feel their paper-thin texture brushing around the inner surface of my skull, scraping minutely but painfully at the insides of my eyeballs and obscuring my vision by degrees, pale to dark, pale to dark, pale to dark, to dark, to dark—
And a thin, rising whine like grief.
‘Wake up, Kovacs.’
The voice was gentle, and there was something nudging at my hand. My eyes seemed to be gummed shut. I lifted one arm and my hand bumped off the smooth curve of the faceplate.
‘Wake up.’ Less gentle now. A tiny jag of adrenalin went eeling along my nerves at the change in tone. I blinked hard and focused. The Martian was still there – no shit, Tak – but my view of the corpse was blocked by the figure in the polalloy suit that stood a safe three or four metres out of reach, Sunjet carried at a wary angle.
The nudging at my hand recommenced. I tipped the helmet and looked down. One of the Martian machines was stroking at my glove with an array of delicate-looking receptors. I shoved it away, and it backed up chittering a couple of places, then came sniffing back undeterred.
Carrera laughed. It rang too loud in the helmet receiver. I felt as if the fluttering wings had somehow hollowed out my head so that my whole skull wasn’t much less delicate than the mummified remains I was sharing the chamber with.
‘That’s right. Fucking thing led me to you, can you believe that? Really helpful little beastie.’
At that point, I laughed too. It seemed the only thing appropriate to the moment. The Wedge commander joined in. He held up the interface gun in his left hand, and laughed louder.
‘Were you going to kill me with this?’
‘Doubt it.’
We both stopped laughing. His faceplate hinged up and he looked down at me out of a face gone slightly haggard around the eyes. I guessed even the short time he’d spent tracking me through the Martian architecture hadn’t been a lot of fun.
I flexed my palm, once, on the off-chance that Loemanako’s gun might not have been personally coded, that any Wedge palm plate might be able to call it. Carrera caught the move and shook his head. He tossed the weapon into my lap.
‘Unloaded anyway. Hold on to it if you like – some men go better that way, holding a gun tight. Seems to help at the end. Substitute for something, I guess. Mother’s hand. Your dick. You want to stand up to die?’
‘No,’ I said softly.
‘Open your helmet?’
‘What for?’
‘Just giving you the option.’
‘Isaac—’ I cleared my throat of what felt like a web of rusted wire. Words scraped through. It seemed suddenly very important to say them. ‘Isaac, I’m sorry.’