Jadwiga, re-sleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an ear-splitting whoop as she discovered the genentech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.

Personally, I don’t like heights.

On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.

I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew.

Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it—they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographies and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.

The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked up vision. Still a kilometre off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line of sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earnt the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.

I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig.

“Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.”

“Take it easy, Micky,” she drawled back. “I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation either. Programmed parameters. Remember that.”

A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background.

On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.

Sylvie sighed. “So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement?