Gunfire started in the grey swirl of the storm. Hiss, sizzle of beam weapons, the boom and bark of slug guns. The beams showed pale blue and yellow in the murk. A distant ripple of thunder across the sky and pale lightning seemed to respond. Someone screamed and fell somewhere up ahead. Indistinct yelling. I cleared the end of the ramp, skidded on the bulge of a wet-bunker module, gained balance with the Eishundo sleeve and leapt forward. Down into the shallow slosh of water between modules, up the bubbled slope of the next. The surface was gritty and gave good purchase. Peripheral vision told me I was the apex of a wedge, Jad on my left flank, Murakami on my right with a plasmafrag gun.
I cranked the neurachem and spotted a maintenance ladder ahead, three of Vlad’s pirates pinned down at the base by gunfire from the dockside above. The sprawled body of a comrade floated against the nearest wet-bunker module, still steaming from face and chest where the blaster fire had scorched the life from its owner.
I flung myself towards the ladder with wincefish abandon.
‘Jad!’
‘Yeah -go!’
Like being back in the Uncleared. Vestiges of Slipin attunement, maybe some twin-like affinity, care of Eishundo. I sprinted flat out. Behind me the shard blaster spoke – spiteful rushing whine in the rain and the edge of the dock exploded in a hail of fragments. More screams. I reached the ladder about the same moment the pirates realised they were no longer pinned down. Stamped my way hurriedly up it, Rapsodia stowed.
At the top, there were bodies, torn and bloodied from the shard fire, and one of Segesvar’s men, injured but still on his feet. He spat and lurched at me with a knife. I twisted aside, locked out the knife arm and threw him off the dock. Short scream, lost in the storm.
Crouch and search, Rapsodia out and sweeping in the poor visibility, while the others came up behind me. Rain smashed down and made a million little geysers back off the evercrete surface. I blinked it out of my eyes.
The dock was clear.
Murakami clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, not bad for a retired man.’
I snorted. ‘Someone’s got to show you how. Come on, this way.’
We stalked along the dock in the rain, found the entrance I wanted and slipped inside, one at a time. The sudden relief from the force of the storm was shocking, almost like silence. We stood dripping water on the plastic floor of a short corridor set with familiar, heavy, portholed metal doors. Thunder growled outside. I peered through the glass of a door just to be sure, and saw a room of blank-faced metal cabinets. Cold storage for the panther feed and, occasionally, the corpses of Segesvar’s enemies. At the end of the corridor, a narrow stairwell led down to the crude re-sleeving unit and veterinary section for the panthers.
I nodded to the stairs.
‘Down there. Three levels and we’re in the wet-bunker complex. ’
The pirates went in the van, noisy and enthusiastic. Meth-wired as they were, and not a little pissed off with having to follow me up the ladder, it would have been hard to dissuade them. Murakami shrugged and didn’t try. They clattered down the stairwell at speed, and ran straight into an ambush at the bottom.
We were a flight of stairs behind, moving with undrugged caution, and even there I felt the splashback from the blasters scorch my face and hands. Cacophony of high, sudden shrieks as the pirates caught fire and died as human torches. One of them made three blundering steps back up out of the inferno, flame-winged arms raised imploringly towards us. His melted face was less than a metre from mine when he collapsed, hissing and smoking, on the cold steel stairs below.
Murakami hurled an ultravibe grenade down the well and it bounced once metallically before the familiar chittering scream kicked in. In the confined space it was deafening. We slapped palms to ears in unison. If anybody down there screamed when it killed them, their deaths were inaudible.
We waited for a second after the grenade died, then Murakami fired the plasmafrag rifle downward. There was no reaction. I crept down past the blackened, cooling corpses of the pirates, gagging at the stench. Peered past the inward-curled, despairing limbs of the one who’d met the brunt of the fire, and saw an empty corridor. Yellow cream walls, floor and ceiling, brilliantly lit with overhead strips of inlaid illuminum. Close to the foot of the stairwell, everything was painted with broad swathes of blood and clotted tissue.
‘Clear.’
We picked our way through the gore and moved cautiously up the corridor, into the heart of the wet-bunker’s base levels. Tanaseda hadn’t known where exactly the captives would be held – the haiduci were twitchy and aggressive about allowing the yakuza a presence in Kossuth in the first place. Precarious in his new role of penitent failed blackmailer, Tanaseda had still insisted, on his own admission because he’d hoped to retrieve the whereabouts of Yukio Hirayasu’s stack from me by torture or extortion and thus cut his loss of face, at least among his own colleagues. Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka, for some byzantine reason or other, agreed and in the end, it was her pressure on Segesvar that forged the diplomatic co-operation between yakuza and haiduci. Tanaseda had been welcomed formally by Segesvar himself, and then been told in no uncertain terms that he’d best find himself accommodation in Newpest or Sourcetown, stay away from the farm unless specifically summoned and keep his men on a tight leash. He’d certainly not been given a tour of the premises.
But really, there was only one secure place in the complex for people you didn’t want dead yet. I’d seen it a couple of times on previous visits, had once even watched some doomed gambling junkie conveyed there while Segesvar thought about how exactly to make an example of him. If you wanted to lock a man up on the farm, you put him where even a monster couldn’t break free. You locked him in the panther cells.
We paused at a crossways, where ventilation systems gaped open above us. Faintly, down the conduits, came the sounds of ongoing battle. I gestured left, murmuring.
‘Down there. The panther cells are all on the right at the next turn, they open onto tunnels that lead directly into the pens. Segesvar converted a couple of them for human holding. Got to be one of those.’
‘Alright, then.’
We picked up the pace again, took the right turn, and then I heard the smooth, solid hum of one of the doors on the cells sliding down into the floor. Footsteps and urgent voices beyond. Segesvar and Aiura, and a third voice I’d heard before but couldn’t place. I clamped down on the savage spurt of joy, flattened myself to the wall and waved Jad and Murakami back.
Aiura, compressed rage as I tuned in.
‘…really expect me to be impressed by this?’
‘Don’t you hand me that shit,’ snapped Segesvar. ‘This is that slant-eyed yak fuck you insisted on bringing aboard. I told you—’
‘Somehow, Segesvar-san, I do not think—’
‘And don’t fucking call me that either. This is Kossuth, not the fucking north. Have a bit of cultural sensitivity, why don’t you. Anton, you sure there’s no intrusion ’cast going down?’
And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.
‘Nothing. This is strictly—’
I should have seen it coming.
I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly-lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—
Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.