‘Jad, where are you?’
‘In the fucking river.’ Short, crunching explosions behind her voice on the link. ‘Look for the downed tank and the million fucking karakuri that want it back.’
I ran.
I killed four more karakuri on the way to the river, all of them far too fast-moving to be corrupted. Whatever had floored Sylvie hadn’t left her time to finish the intrusion run.
On the audio link, Lazlo yelped and cursed. It sounded like damage. Jadwiga shouted a steady stream of obscenities at the mimints, counterpoint for the flat reports of her shard blaster.
I winced past the tumbling wreckage of the last mech puppet and sprinted flat out for the bank. At the edge, I jumped. Drenching impact of icy water splashed to groin height and suddenly the swirling sound of the river. Mossed stones underfoot and a sensation like hot sweat in my feet as the genentech spines tried instinctively to grip inside my boots. Grab after balance. I nearly went over, didn’t quite. Flexed like a tree in a high wind, beat my own momentum barely and stayed upright, knee deep. I scanned for the tank.
Near the other bank, I found it, collapsed in what looked like about a metre of fast-flowing water. Cranked up vision gave me Jadwiga and Lazlo huddled in the lee of the wreck, karakuri crawling on the riverbank, but seemingly not keen to trust themselves to the current the river was running. A couple had jumped to the tank’s hull, but didn’t seem able to get much purchase. Jadwiga was firing at them one-handed, almost at random. Her other arm was wrapped around Lazlo. There was blood on both of them.
The range was a hundred metres – too far for effective shooting with the shard blaster. I ploughed into the river until it reached chest height and was still too far off. The current tried to knock me down.
‘Motherfucking—’
I kicked off and swam awkwardly, Ronin held to my chest with one arm. Instantly, the current started tugging me away downstream.
‘Fuuuck—’
The water was freezing, crushing my lungs closed against the need to breathe, numbing the skin on face and hands. The current felt like a living thing, yanking insistently at my legs and shoulders as I thrashed about. The weight of the shard blaster and the bandolier of ultravibe mines tried to drag me under.
Did drag me under.
I flailed to the surface of the water, sucked for air, got half and half, went under again.
Get a grip, Kovacs.
Think.
Get a fucking GRIP.
I kicked for the surface, forced myself up and filled my lungs. Took a bearing on the rapidly receding wreck of the spider tank. Then I let myself be dragged down, reached for the bottom and grabbed hold.
The spines gripped. I found purchase with my feet as well, braced myself against the current and started to crawl across the river bed.
It took longer than I’d have liked.
In places the stones I chose were too small or too poorly embedded and they ripped loose. In other places, my boots couldn’t gouge enough purchase. I gave up seconds and metres of ground each time, flailed back again. Once I nearly lost the shard blaster. And anaerobic enhancement or not, I had to come up every three or four minutes for air.
But I made it.
After what seemed like an eternity of grabbing and rooting around in the stabbing, cramping cold, I stood up in waist-high water, staggered to the bank and hauled myself panting and shaking out of the river. For a couple of moments, it was all I could do to kneel there, coughing.
Rising machine hum.
I staggered to my feet, trying to hold the shard blaster somewhere close to still in both trembling hands. My teeth were chattering as if something had short circuited in my jaw muscles.
‘Micky.’
Orr, seated astride one of the bugs, a long-barrelled Ronin of his own in one raised hand. Stripped to the waist, blast discharge vents still not fully closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonised dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.
He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.
‘Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.’
‘I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—’
He nodded. ‘Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.’
‘And sssssSylvie?’
He looked away.
CHAPTER TEN
‘How is she?’
Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.
‘Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.’
A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colours and motion. Recognisable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.
‘That’s the command software?’
‘Yeah.’ Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright grey raged around her fingertip. ‘This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.’
I looked at the multicoloured tangle. ‘Lot of activity.’
‘Yeah, far too much. Post run, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.’ She shrugged again. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this before.’
I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.
‘What went wrong out there today, Ki?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an anti-viral that already knew our intrusion systems.’
‘In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.’
‘I know.’
‘They say the stuff is evolving.’ Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone. Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. ‘Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—’
Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. ‘Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?’
‘—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.’ Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil. ‘That’s black clinic software in there, and it’s going to eat Sylvie’s mind if we don’t find a blueprint for it. And that’s bad news, because the original architects are all back in fucking Millsport.’
‘And that,’ shouted Kiyoka, ‘is fucking bullshit.’
‘Hoy!’ To my amazement, they both shut up and looked at me. ‘Uh, look. Las. I don’t see how even evolved software is going to map onto our particular systems just like that. I mean, what are the odds?’
‘Because it’s the same people, Mick. Come on. Who writes the stuff for deCom? Who designed the whole deCom programme? And who’s buried to the fucking balls in developing secret black nanotech? The fucking Mecsek administration, that’s who.’ Lazlo spread his hands, gave me a world-weary look. ‘You know how many reports there are, how many people I know, I’ve talked to, who’ve seen mimints there are no fucking archive descriptors for? This whole continent’s an experiment, man, and we’re just a little part of it. And the skipper there just got dumped in the rat’s maze.’