‘Last time you checked? What the fuck is that, Isa? How long ago was that?’
‘I don’t know, I was watching the radar for you!’ Her voice rose with hurt. ‘Saw you were coming in, I thought—’
‘How fucking long, Isa?’
She bit her lip and stared back at me. ‘Not long, alright!’
‘You st—’ I clenched a fist at my side. Summoned calm. It wasn’t her fault, none of this was her fault. ‘Isa, I need you to go down and get on the comset right now. Please. Call in, check with Koi that everything’s okay. Tell him we’re done here, we’re on our way out.’
‘Okay.’ The hurt was still in her face and tone. ‘I’m going.’
I watched her go, sighed and helped Brasil and Tres lift Sylvie Oshima’s limp, overheated body. Her head lolled back and I had to shift one hand up quickly to support it. The mane of grey hair seemed to twitch in places as it hung, damp with spray, but it was a feeble movement. I looked down into the pale and flushed face and felt my jaw tighten with frustration. Isa was right, she did look like shit. Not what you thought of when you imagined the flashing-eyed, lithe-limbed combat heroine of the Unsettlement. Not what you’d expect when men like Koi talked of a woken and vengeful ghost.
I don’t know, she’s well on her way to the ghost part.
Ha fucking ha.
Isa appeared at the top of the stern companion way, just as we got there. Wrapped up in my own sour thoughts, it took me a moment to look up at her face. And by then, it was too late.
‘Kovacs, I’m sorry,’ she pleaded.
The swoopcopter.
Faintly, the soft strop of rotors, rising out of the backdrop noise from the maelstrom. Death and fury approaching, on ninja wings.
‘They’re down,’ Isa cried. ‘First Family commandos tracked them. Ado’s hit, the rest of them are. Half of them are. They got Mitzi Harlan.’
‘Who did?’ Sierra Tres, eyes gone uncharacteristically wide. ‘Who’s got her now? Koi or—’
But I already knew the answer to that one.
‘Incoming!’
I screamed it. Was already trying to get Sylvie Oshima to the deck without dropping her. Brasil had the same idea, but he was moving in the wrong direction. Sylvie’s body tugged between us. Sierra Tres yelled. We all seemed to be moving in mud, gracelessly slow.
Like a million furious watersprites let loose, the hail of machine-gun fire ripped out of the ocean on our stern, then up across Boubin Islander’s lovingly finished deck. Eerily, it was silent. Water splashed and splattered, harmlessly quiet and playful. Wood and plastic leapt out of everything in splinters around us. Isa screamed.
I got Sylvie down in the stern seats. Landed on top of her. Out of the darkened sky, hard on the heels of its own silenced machine-gun fire, the Dracul machine came hammering across the water at strafing height. The guns started up again and I rolled off the seat, dragging Sylvie’s unresponsive form down with me. Something blunt smashed against my ribs as I hit the ground in the confined space. I felt the swoopcopter’s shadow pass across me and then it was gone, quietened motors muttering in its wake.
‘Kovacs?’ It was Brasil, from above on the deck.
‘Still here. You?’
‘He’s coming back.’
‘Of course he fucking is.’ I poked my head out of cover and saw the Dracul banking about in the mist-blurred air. The first run had been a stealth assault – he didn’t know we weren’t expecting him. Now it didn’t matter. He’d take his time, sit out at a distance and chew us to shreds.
Motherfucker.
It geysered out of me. All the stored-up fight that the stand-off with Aiura hadn’t allowed a discharge for. I flailed upright in the stern seats, got a grip on the companionway coaming and hauled myself onto the deck. Brasil was crouched there, frag rifle cradled in both arms. He nodded grimly forward. I followed the look and the rage took a new twist inside me. Sierra Tres lay with one leg smashed to red glinting fragments. Isa was down near her, drenched in blood. Her breath was coming in tight little gasps. A couple of metres off, the frag rifle she’d brought up on deck lay abandoned.
I ran to it, scooped it up like a loved child.
Brasil opened fire from the other side of the deck. His frag rifle went off with a ripping, cracking roar and muzzle flash stabbed out a metre from the end of the barrel. The swoopcopter swung in from the right, flinching upward as the pilot spotted the fire. More machine-gun slugs ripped across Boubin Islander’s masts with a pinging sound, too high to worry about. I braced myself against the gently pitching deck and put the stock to my shoulder. Lined up, and started shooting as the Dracul drifted back. The rifle roared in my ear. Not much hope of a hit, but standard frag load is proximity fused and maybe, just maybe—
Maybe he’ll slow down enough for you to get close? Come on, Micky.
For a moment, I remembered the Sunjet, dropped on the parapet as I lifted Sylvie Oshima. If I’d had it now I could have this motherfucker out of the sky as easy as spitting.
Yeah, instead, you’re stuck with one of Brasil’s museum pieces. Nice going, Micky. That mistake is about to kill you.
The second source of ground fire seemed to have rattled the pilot slightly, for all that nothing we were throwing into the sky had touched him. Maybe he wasn’t a military flyer. He passed over us again at a steep, side-slipping angle, almost snagging on the masts. He was low enough that I saw his masked face peering downward as he banked the machine. Teeth gritted in fury, face soaked with the upcast spray of the maelstrom, I followed him with frag fire, trying to keep him in the sight long enough to get a hit.
And then, in the midst of the gunsnarl and drifting mist, something exploded near the Dracul’s tail. One of us had managed to put a frag shell close enough for proximity fusing. The swoopcopter staggered and pivoted about. It seemed undamaged, but the near miss must have scared the pilot. He kicked his craft upward again, backing around us in a wide, rising arc. The silent machine-gun fire kicked in again, came ripping across the deck towards me. The magazine of the frag gun emptied, locked open. I threw myself sideways, hit the deck and slid towards the rail on spray-slick wood—
And the angelfire reached down.
Out of nowhere, a long probing finger of blue. It stabbed out of the clouds, sliced across the spray-soaked air and abruptly the swoopcopter was gone. No more machine-gun fire scuttling greedily at me, no explosion, no real noise outside the crackle of abused air molecules in the path of the beam. The sky where the Dracul had been caught fire, flared up and then faded into the glow of an afterimage on my retina.
—and I slammed into the rail.
For a long moment there was only the sound of the maelstrom and the slap of wavelets against the hull just below me. I craned my head up and stared. The sky remained stubbornly empty.
‘Got you, you motherfucker,’ I whispered to it.
Memory slotted. I got myself upright and ran to where Isa and Sierra Tres both lay in running swipes of spray-diluted blood. Tres had propped herself against the side of the fairweather cockpit, and was tying herself a tourniquet from shreds of blood-soaked cloth. Her teeth gritted as she pulled it tight – a single grunt of pain got past her. She caught my eye and nodded, then rolled her head to where Brasil crouched beside Isa, hands frantic over the teenager’s sprawled body. I came and peered over his shoulder.
She must have taken six or seven slugs through the stomach and legs. Below the chest, it looked as if she’d been savaged by a swamp panther. Her face was still now, and the panting breaths from before had slowed. Brasil looked up at me and shook his head.