The captain considered my answer for a couple of seconds, weighing up the risks. “Then do it,” she said.

“Aye-aye.”

I collated the data from my targeting sensors and fired my cannons. It was a short burst, no more than a second and a half. When it was over, eleven men and women lay injured, the flesh flensed from their limbs, parts of their skeletons shattered and pulverised—but all still technically alive.

In the sudden absence of small arms fire, silence returned, broken only by the wind scouring the rocks and feathering the grass.

“Hostiles neutralised,” I reported.

I aligned my long axis with the direction of the street and began to descend. My pointed bow had plenty of clearance, but my wider stern caught the front of a shop on the opposite side of the road to the saloon and began to crush it. The AG generators whined in protest, but I persisted, forcing my bulk lower and lower, ripping down through the building’s façade with a piercing squeal. Dust and rubble fell into the street, but I kept lowering until the heavy armour plate of my belly almost kissed the mud.

The remains of the saloon’s bullet-tattered door hinged open and Alva Clay appeared on the threshold, gun in hand, alert for attack from the street. She was supporting an unknown female with a gunshot wound to the leg. Behind her, Captain Konstanz helped an injured male into the daylight. I opened my anterior airlock and moved back a little—further demolishing the shop front on the opposite side of the road—in order to make it possible for them to step directly from the raised walkway at the front of the saloon to the shelter of the airlock’s interior. At the same time, I kept the majority of my attention on the surrounding buildings. Via my sensors, I could see dozens of people huddled in cellars and back rooms. Their infrared silhouettes blazed against the background chill of their draughty houses, and my cannon turrets clicked and swivelled to keep them all covered. If any of them so much as reached for a breadknife, they’d be shredded meat before they had the slightest chance to further imperil my crew.

Twenty-Three: Ona Sudak

TWENTY-THREE

ONA SUDAK

After two hours of walking, Adam and I were so deeply entangled in the labyrinth that even had I wanted to find my way back to the shipwreck of the Geest van Amsterdam, I doubted I’d have been able. The air temperature in the canyons felt close to freezing and I was grateful for both the warmth of the survival suit, and Adam’s presence of mind in having procured it for me. Without it, the thin surgeon’s scrubs that I had pilfered would have been of little comfort.