“Micky?” Jad’s voice from the bunk above.

“Takeshi.”

“Whatever. Let’s stick with Micky, huh?”

“Alright.”

“You think that fuck Anton’s going to be there today?”

I levered my eyes open again. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Tanaseda seemed to think so. Looks like Kovacs is still using him anyway, maybe as a safeguard. If no one’s sure what to expect from Sylvie or the thing she’s carrying, might be comforting to have another command head around.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” She paused. Then, just as my eyes were sliding closed once more. “It doesn’t bother you, talking about yourself that way. Knowing he’s out there?”

“Of course it bothers me.” I yawned cavernously. “I’m going to kill the little fuck.”

Silence. I let my eyelids shutter themselves.

“So Micky.”

“What?”

“If Anton is there?”

I rolled my eyes at the bunk above me. “Yes?”

“If he’s there, I want that motherfucker. You have to shoot him, you wreck his legs or something. He’s mine.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it, Micky.”

“So do I,” I mumbled, tilting ponderously away under the weight of deferred sleep. “Kill whoever you fucking like, Jad.”

Kill whoever you fucking like.

It could have been a mission statement for the raid.

We hit the farm at ramming speed. Garbled distress broadcasts got us close enough that any long-range weaponry Segesvar had would be useless.

Vlad’s helmsman ran a vector that looked like driven before the storm but was actually a high-speed controlled swerve. By the time the haiduci realised what was going on, Impaler was upon them. She smashed in through the panther pens, crushing webbing barriers and the old wooden jetties of the original baling station, unstoppable, ripping loose the planking, demolishing decayed antique walls, carrying the growing mass of piled-up wreckage forward on her armoured nose.

Look, I told Murakami and Vlad the night before, there is no subtle way to do this. And Vlad’s eyes lit up with meth-fired enthusiasm.

Impaler ploughed to a clanking, grinding halt amidst the half submerged wet-bunker modules. Her decks were canted steeply to the right, and down on the debarkation level, a dozen collision alerts shrilled hysterically in my ears as the hatches on that side blew wide open on explosive bolts.

Boarding ramps dropped like bombs, livewire security lines at their tips, writhing and shredding into evercrete for purchase. Dully through the hull, I heard the clang and whirr of the major grapple lines firing. Impaler caught and clung fast.

It was a system once designed only for emergency use, but the pirates had rewired every aspect of their vessel for fast assault, boarding and battery. Only the machine mind that ran it all had been left out of the loop, and still thought we were a ship in crisis.