I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still halfway up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down. His mouth gaped wide. His sun lenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare.

The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.

The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons.

The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up.

Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.

The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels.

“Well. That seemed to work.”

Orr stepped past me, peering down at what was apparently his handiwork.

He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back. They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her.

“Narrow beam,” he diagnosed. “Took out the heart and most of the right lung. Not much we can do for her here.”

“Someone close the door,” suggested Sylvie.

As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech. Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up.

“Report this?” Kiyoka, a slight woman in what had to be a custom-grown Maori sleeve, wanted to know. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip.

“To?” Orr flipped her a rapid thumb and little finger gesture. His other hand traced tattooing across his face.

“Oh. And him?”

Sylvie did something with her face, gestured low. I missed it, guessed and grabbed.

“They were here for me.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Orr was looking at me with something that grazed open hostility. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn’t hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast. “Some nice friends you’ve got.”

“I don’t think they would have got violent if Jad hadn’t jumped the goon. It was a misunderstanding.”

“Misunder—fuck.” Orr’s eyes widened. “Jad is dead, you asshole.”