And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.

“Nothing. This is strictly—”

I should have seen it coming.

I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly-lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—

Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.

“Anton, you motherless fuck!”

I came off the wall, spinning to cover them all with the Rapsodia.

Too late.

I took in a glimpse of the three of them, gaping in shock. Segesvar met my eyes and flinched. Jad stood braced, shard gun riding her hip, levelled.

Anton saw and reacted, deCom swift. He seized Aiura Harlan Tsuruoka by the shoulders and hurled her in front of him. The shard gun coughed.

The Harlan security exec screa—

—and came apart from shoulders to waist as the monomol swarm ripped through her. Blood and tissue exploded through the air around us, splattered me, blinded me—

In the time it took me to wipe my eyes, they were both gone. Back through the cell they’d come out of, and the tunnel beyond. What remained of Aiura lay on the floor in three pieces and puddles of gore.

“Jad, what the fuck are you playing at?” I yelled.

She wiped her face, smearing blood. “Told you I’d get him.”

I grabbed at calm. Stabbed a finger at the carnage around our feet. “You didn’t get him, Jad. He’s gone.” Calm failed me, collapsed catastrophically before focusless fury. “How could you be so fucking stupid. He’s fucking gone.”

“Then I’ll fucking catch him up.”

“No, we nee—”

But she was already moving again, across the opened cell at a fast deCom lope. Ducking into the tunnel.

“Nice going, Tak,” said Murakami sardonically. “Command presence. I like that.”

“Shut up, Tod. Just find the monitor room, check the cells. They’re all around here somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I was backing off, moving before I finished speaking. Sprinting again, after Jad, after Segesvar.

After something.

FORTY-SIX

The tunnel came out in a fight pit. Steep, sloping evercrete sides, ten metres tall and torn ragged for half their height by decades of swamp panthers trying to claw their way out. Railed spectator space around the top, all open to a sky clogged with a fast-moving stampede of greenish cloud cover. It was impossible to look directly up in the rain. Thirty centimetres of thick mud in the bottom of the pit, now pounded into brown sludge by the downpour. The drainage vents in the walls couldn’t keep up.

I squinted through the water in the air and on my face, spotted Jad halfway up the narrow maintenance ladder cut into one corner of the pit.