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“Come on, you asshole.” It croaked out of my damaged mouth. “Put me away.”
He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.
On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin’s grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.
I came down on the injured ribs and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a foetal ball and saw Kadmin’s borrowed features a thousand metres above me.
“Get up,” he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance. “We’re not finished yet.”
I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicoloured lights and then everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought to keep me conscious. The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the damage that had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied. Consciousness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with Jimmy de Soto.
“Earth?” His gri
“Bullshit.” My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion track. In a rare moment when the Sharyan jamming went down, we’ve heard that Admiral Cursitor’s IP fleet is still light seconds out, fighting the Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn’t over, the locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not looking good.
At least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my temperature begi
The robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters.
“Bullshit, is it?” Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider tank’s hull. “Hey, you’re not from there. I am, and I’m telling you if they gave me the choice of life on earth or fucking storage, I’d have to give it some thought. You get the chance to visit, don’t.”
I blinked the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the roof.
“Told you not to go there, didn’t I pal. Now look at you. Earth.” He spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. “It’s a shithole. Got to get to the next screen.”
The crowd noise had settled down to a steady chanting.
The anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled with laughter.
Get to the next screen.
I lurched to my feet.
You don’t do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night.
The voice jumped into my head, a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly a century and a half of objective time. A man I hadn’t soiled my memory with for most of my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn up now, when I really needed the shit:.
The Patchwork Man will come for you.
Well, you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man’s standing right over there, waiting. He’s not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything.
I summoned what was left from cellular levels in Ryker’s body and stalked forward.
Glass shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space between Kadmin and myself.
“Kadmin!”
I saw his eyes raised to the gantry above and then his entire chest seemed to explode. His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly off balance and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was torn off and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted and fell in ropes.
I whipped round, staring upwards, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted except for the remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit. Trepp was firing into the audience.
Down on the floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming. I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, towards the sound. Carnage was on fire.
Braced in the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a long-barrelled blaster. Carnage was in flames from the waist up, beating at himself with arms that had themselves grown wings of fire. The shrieking he made was more the sound of fury than of pain. Pernilla Grip lay dead at his feet, chest scorched through. As I watched, Carnage pitched forward over her like a figure made of melting wax and his shrieks modulated down through groans to a weird electronic bubbling and then to nothing.
“Kovacs?”
Trepp’s frag gun had fallen silent, and against the ensuing background of groaning and cries from the injured, Bautista’s raised voice was u
“You OK, Kovacs?”
I chuckled weakly, then clutched abruptly at the stabbing pain in my side.
“Great, just great. How’s Ortega?”
“She’s OK. Got her dosed up on lethinol for the shock. Sorry we got here so late.” He gestured up at Trepp. “Took your friend there a while to get through to me at Fell Street. She refused to go through official cha
I glanced around at the manifest organic damage.