Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
Then he flinched, his eyes fluttered upward and his expression blanked as Sylvie reached in and twisted something inside his head. He swayed and the deCom next to him had to grab his arm to steady him. He made a noise like a freak fighter taking a heavy punch. Slurred voice, thick with outrage.
“Fucking—”
“Back off, swamp boy.” It trailed out behind her, laconic, as we left the ‘fab.
She hadn’t even looked in his direction.
SEVEN
The gate was a single slab of grey alloy armouring six metres across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-metre towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the grey metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.
Kurumaya’s clean-up volunteers stood about in small knots before the gate, muttered conversation laced with brief flares of loud bravado. As Sylvie had predicted, most were young and inexperienced, both qualities telegraphed clearly in the awkwardness with which they handled their equipment and gawked around them. The sparse assortment of hardware they had was none too impressive either. Weaponry looked to be largely obsolete military surplus, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen vehicles all told—transport for maybe half of the fifty-odd deComs present, some of it not even grav-effect. The rest, it seemed, were doing the sweep on foot.
Command heads were few and far between.
“How it’s done,” said Kiyoka complacently. She leaned back on the nose of the grav bug I was riding and folded her arms. The little vehicle rocked slightly on its parking cushion and I upped the field to compensate. “See, most sprogs got no money to speak of, they come into the game practically systems-blind. Try and earn cash for the upgrades with clean-up work and maybe some easy bounty on the edges of the Uncleared. If they get lucky, they do good work and someone notices them. Maybe some crew with losses takes them on.”
“And if not?”
“Then they go grow their own hair.” Lazlo grinned up from the opened pannier he was rifling through on one of the other two bugs. “Right, skipper?”