Cossont looked idly, groggily down at her hip. The shoulder bag wasn’t there. It must have been ripped away.

Shit, she thought.

The man in the glittering suit was floating, stationary, in the middle of the elevator shaft, looking in at them. He tipped his head to one side, as though wondering what to make of them. The combat arbite shuffled to one side, to keep a clear field of fire.

“We really are fucked, aren’t we?” Cossont said, her voice sounding odd inside her head and the helmet. She could taste what was probably her own blood in her mouth.

“Not necessarily,” Berdle replied through the earbud, sounding, as ever, relatively unconcerned. “Still one knife missile left.”

“But I thought it …”

“It left. It was not destroyed,” Berdle told her. “It went the long way round the building. I suspect they assumed any combat missiles we had left would just burst through anything in their way; certainly that would be the first thing to occur to a knife missile. So – although this has taken longer, nevertheless – the element of surprise is with the missile. Here we are; that’ll be it now,” the avatar announced, as light erupted all around the combat arbite.

The man in the glittering suit started to whirl round to where the combat arbite was throwing its arms up and disappearing and disintegrating inside a consuming torrent of white fire. Then the view went dark.

More battering and pummelling. It was like being slung into a big metal drum with a bunch of sharp rocks and being kicked down a steep mountainside studded with boulders.

“The knife missiles in use here are from the Miniaturised Drone Advanced Weapon System,” Berdle told her as floor, the shelves and the air itself all seemed to shake and quiver and beat. “Though it bears mention that it was ‘Advanced’ rather a long time ago. Still. And AM power is very crude, really. Raw, ragged stuff. Not really suitable for this kind of civilian-environment, in-structure work – far too battlefield – but it was all I had. Interestingly, the nanomissiles doing the damage are only a millimetre long and a tenth of that in diameter; too small to see for most unaided eyes; astonishing what you can do with anti-matter. There. Oh. Here—” Just as the battering seemed to be tailing off, there was another single, thudding, titanic impact, then Berdle said, “Ouch. Bet that hurt. Oh well, down you go …”

The view came back. The elevator shaft and the lit corridor beyond were full of dust and smoke. The doorway where the combat arbite had been standing was no longer a neat rectangle; it was practically circular, and most of the shattered, ragged edges were glowing. One or two shattered bits of machinery lying smoking, flaming or sputtering on the floor of the corridor might have been parts of the arbite. Of the man in the glittering suit, there was no sign. Something flashed briefly in the shaft.