The neurachem slammed on line. Time turned to sludge around me as the Eishundo sleeve went to combat aware. I was staring sideways in disbelief at Dig 301 when the first blast cut past me. I saw the flare of disrupted air where it came through the construct’s projected presence and then I was spinning away sideways as my jacket caught fire.

“Motherfu—”

No gun, no knife. I’d left them both inside. No time to reach the door, and Envoy instinct kicked me away from it anyway. Later, I’d realise what the situational intuition already knew—going back inside was a bolthole suicide. Jacket still in flames, I tumbled into the cover of the cabin wall.

The blaster beam flashed again, nowhere near me. They were firing at Dig 301 again, misreading her for a solid human target.

Not exactly ninja-grade combat skills, flashed through my mind. These guys are the local hired help.

Yeah but they have guns and you don’t.

Time to change arenas.

Fire-retardant material in my jacket had the flames down to smoke and heat across my ribs. The scorched fibres oozed damping polymer. I drew one hard breath and sprinted.

Yells behind me, boiling instantly from disbelief to anger. Maybe they thought they’d taken me down with the first shot, maybe they just weren’t all that bright. It took them a pair of seconds to start shooting. By then I was almost to the next cabin. Blaster fire crackled in my ears. Heat flared close to my hip and my flesh cringed. I flinched sideways, got the cabin at my back and scanned the ground ahead.

Three more cabins, gathered in a rough arc on the ground quarried out by the original archaeologues. Beyond them, the eyrie lifted off into the sky from massive cantilevered supports, like some vast premillennial rocket poised for launch. I hadn’t been inside the day before, there was altogether too much abrupt space underfoot and a straight drop five hundred metres to the slanted mountainside below. But I knew from previous experience what the alien perspectives of Martian architecture could do to human perceptions, and I knew the Envoy conditioning would hold up.

Local hired help. Hold that thought.

They’d come in after me hesitantly at best, confused by the dizzying swoop of the interior, maybe even spiked with a little superstitious dread if

I was lucky. They’d be off balance, they’d be afraid.

They’d make mistakes.

Which made the eyrie a perfect killing ground.