“Skipper,” Lazlo again, an edge in his voice this time. “Maybe instead of talking about this, we could just do it, you know? In the next two minutes? What do you reckon?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka glanced at Jadwiga’s sprawled corpse and then away.

“Let’s get out of here. Now.”

Sylvie nodded. The Slipins mounted up and we cruised in formation towards the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.

No one looked back.

EIGHT

As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.

We were a good five hundred metres the other side of the temple when it blew. There was a muffled series of detonations, and then a rumbling that built to a roar. I twisted in my seat—with Jadwiga now in Orr’s pocket instead of riding pillion, the view was unobstructed—and in the narrow frame of the street we had taken I saw the whole structure slump undramatically to the ground amidst a boiling cloud of dust. A minute later, an underpass took us below street level and I lost even that fractional view.

I rode level with the other two bugs

“You had this all mapped out?” I asked. “All the time, you knew this was what you were going to do?”

Sylvie nodded gravely in the dim light of the tunnel. Unlike the temple, here the effect was unintended. Decayed illuminum panelling overhead cast a last-gasp bluish glow over everything but it was less than you’d get on a triple-moon night with clear sky. Navigation lights sprang up on the bugs in response. The underpass angled right and we lost the wash of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel behind us. The air started to turn chilly.

“Been through here half a hundred times before,” drawled Orr. “That temple’s been a bolthole dream every time. Just we never had anyone to run away from before.”

“Yeah, well thanks for sharing.”

A ripple of deCom mirth in the blue gloom.

“Thing is,” Lazlo said. “Couldn’t really let you in on the loop without real-time auditory communication, and that’s clumsy. The skip clued us and cued us in about fifteen seconds through the crew net. You we would have had to tell, you know, with words. And the amount of state-of-the-art coms gear floating around the beachhead, no way to know who’s listening in.”

“We had no choice,” said Kiyoka.

“No choice,” echoed Sylvie. “Bodies burnt, and screaming skies and they tell me, I tell myself—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, guys. Fucking slippage again. Really got to get this sorted when we’re back south.”

I nodded back the way we’d come. “So how long before those guys get their scan systems back up?”

The deComs looked at each other. Sylvie shrugged.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, depends what failsafe software they had.”

“Too bad if the karakuri show up in the meantime, huh?”

Kiyoka snorted. Lazlo raised an eyebrow.