“Yeah.” I shook my head. ”

“ ‘S nothing.”

At my back, Jadwiga’s corpse clutched me a little closer.

We made the shadows of the temple without incident. The angled stonework bulked over our heads, leading the eye upward towards huge statues of daiko drummers. Steep-leaning load-bearing support structures like drunken pillars, merging seamlessly with the fused-glass floor. Light fell in from side vents and rainwater from the roof in incessant clattering streams further back in the gloom. Orr pushed his bug inward with what seemed to me a lack of due care.

“This’ll do,” Sylvie called, voice loud enough to echo in the space we’d entered. She stood, leaned on Orr’s shoulder and twisted herself lithely to the floor beside the bug. “Make it quick, guys.”

Lazlo vaulted from the back of Kiyoka’s bug and prowled about for a while, apparently scanning the supporting structure of the temple. Orr and Kiyoka started to dismount.

“What are we—” I started, and stopped at the muffled sense of a dead comlink in my ear. I braked the bug, tugged the comset off and stared at it.

My gaze flickered to the deComs and what they were doing. “Boy! Someone want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?”

Kiyoka offered me a busy smile in passing. She was carrying a webbing belt strapped with enough demolition charges to—

“Sit tight, Micky,” she said easily. “Be done in a moment.”

“Here,” Lazlo was saying. “Here. And here. Orr?”

The giant waved a hand from the other side of the deserted space. “In hand. Maps just like you figured, Sylvie. Couple more, max.”

They were placing the charges.

I stared up at the propped and vaulted architecture.

“Oh no. Oh no, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I moved to get off and Jadwiga’s dead grip wrapped around my chest. “Sylvie!”

She looked up briefly from where she was knelt before a black satchelled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicoloured data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.

“Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ‘S all we need.”

I jerked a thumb backwards at Jadwiga. “Get this fucking thing off me, before I break it, Sylvie.”

She sighed and got up. Jadwiga let go of me and sagged. I twisted in the bug saddle and caught her before she could topple to the floor. Sylvie reached me about the same time. She nodded to herself.

“Okay. Want to be useful?”

“I want to know what the fuck this is about.”

“Later. Right now, you can take that knife I gave you back in Tekitomura and cut the stack out of Jad’s spine for me. Seems to be a core skill for you, and I don’t know that any of the rest of us want the duty.”