I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards—there was, for example no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves—but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.

“…in a struggle that has surfaced again and again in every place the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—”

Movement.

Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength—Sylvie had estimated the coop’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.

“Then you leave me no choice,” it said. “I shall be forced to neutralise your incursion with immediate effect.”

“Yeah,” said Lazlo through a yawn. “You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.”

“I am already about it.”

Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley towards us, heat-seeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted.

The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-metre drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.

Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared.

Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were—came equipped with gekkogene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could—assuming I actually fucking wanted to—scramble up a hundred metres of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly-tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain.