NINE

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang.

A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty metres below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.

“Leave us alone,” it repeated. “And we’ll do you the same favour.”

“Can’t do that.” Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. “You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.”

“Yeah.” Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. “And besides which, we want the fucking land.”

“The essence of empowerment,” said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, “is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonwealth economic constitution…”

“You are the aggressors here.” The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. “We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.”

Kiyoka snorted. “Oh, come off it.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” rumbled Orr.

It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems, and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge.

Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.

So, after a fashion, had I.

“…those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic …”

Drone’s the right flicking word.