All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armour, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November 17th Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?”

“Who the fuck cares?” echoed Jadwiga.

“We would have,” I pointed out. “If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.”

It was unfair—if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

“Correct!” she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centres in the brain spewing an analogue of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio- phone link. “Correct your flicking parameters.”

The shell hit.

Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then—nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshalled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

“…our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has …”

Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake, and called me a liar.

A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.