HP' " ' "tP? closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonised dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.

He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.

“Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.”

“I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—”

He nodded. “Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.”

“And sssssSylvie?”

He looked away.

TEN

How is she?”

Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.

“Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.”

A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colours and motion. Recognisable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.

“That’s the command software?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright grey raged around her fingertip. “This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.”

I looked at the multicoloured tangle. “Lot of activity.”

“Yeah, far too much. Post run, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.” She shrugged again. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.

“What went wrong out there today, Ki?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an anti-viral that already knew our intrusion systems.”

“In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.”

“I know.”

“They say the stuff is evolving.” Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone.

Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. “Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—”

Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. “Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?”

“—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.” Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil.