“Wouldn’t you be?” Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. “What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.” He choked a laugh. “And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.”

I felt suddenly like sitting down again. The trembling from the stunblast came rolling back over me, up from the guts and through my head, leaving it light. I swallowed the nausea and tried to think straight over a clamour of suddenly recalled detail. Sylvie’s Slipins in laconic, murderous action against the scorpion gun cluster.

Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.

Yeah. And besides which, we want the flicking land.

Orr and his wrecking bar, stood over the dysfunctional karakuri in the tunnel under Drava. So we going to switch it off or what?

DeCom bravado aboard Guns for Guevara, vaguely amusing for its ludicrous presumption, until you gave it a context that might mean something.

Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.

Yeah, count me in. Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.

Oh fuck.

“You really think she could do that,” I asked numbly. “You think she’s capable of talking to the orbitals?”

He bared his teeth. It was anything but a grin. “Tak, for all I know she already has been talking to them. We’ve got her sedated right now, and the Tseng gear is monitoring her for transmissions, that’s part of the brief, but there’s no telling what she’s already done.”

“And if she starts?”

He shrugged and looked away. “Then I’ve got my orders.”

“Oh, great. Very constructive.”