“You hurt two,” Gelai told him. “They’re backing off.”

“Hurt? Great.”

“Come on,” Monica said. “We can get to the cars.” She raised her voice. “Random suppression fire, vertical. I want those bastards fleeing us. Okay, move .”

Eight machine guns opened fire into the overhead lattice as everyone rushed towards the hole in the wall.

High above them, and safe in his web of metal cables, Baranovich looked out of a filthy window at the three Tonalan police cars drawn up outside. There were long skid marks in the snow behind each of them, evidence of their hard braking. One other surviving police car was chasing after the twenty-first-century rally car, siren blaring and lights flashing as they both tore along the bottom of the shed wall. Dark-clad officers were advancing towards the embassy cars.

“Let’s liven things up a little,” he said above the fractious roar of the machine guns and whining ricochets. He joined hands with the three possessed beside him. Together they launched a huge fireball and sent it curving down on one of the stationary police cars.

The response was immediate and overwhelming. After having their car processors glitched, then crashing, being shot at by starship X-ray lasers, losing their suspects, and now having to verify whether the embassy cars were occupied by armed ESA operatives, the Tonalan security police were by now understandably a little tense. Every weapon they had was abruptly trained on Disassembly Shed Four.

Monica was twenty metres from the smashed door when the ancient, brittle panels were bombarded by hollow-case bullets, TI pulses, maser beams, and small EE rounds. Blinding light ruptured the gloom ahead of her. She hit the floor hard as white-hot fragments slashed through the air. Smoking particles rained down around her, sizzling on the moist concrete. Several landed on her head, singeing through her hair to sting her scalp.

“THIS IS THE POLICE. ABANDON YOUR WEAPONS. COME OUT ONE AT A TIME WITH YOUR BLOCKS AND IMPLANTS DEACTIVATED. YOU WILL NOT BE TOLD AGAIN.”

“Holy fuck,” Monica grunted. She raised her head. A huge strip of the wall had vanished; maleficent shifting light from the orbital battle shone in. It illuminated a multitude of broken girders whose fractured ends dripped glowing droplets. The framework structure emitted a distressed groan; weakened junctions were snapping under the stress of the new loading, starting a chain reaction. She could see whole levels of metal bending then dropping in juddery motions.

“Move!” she shouted. “It’s going to land on us.”

A flare of white fire billowed down out of the darkness, pummelling an operative to her knees. Her screams vanished beneath the plangent crackling of her armour suit and skin igniting.

Four machine guns opened up in response.

“No,” Monica said. That was exactly what they wanted. It was a near-perfect snare manoeuvre, she admitted angrily as she flung her arms over her head again. And we blundered right into it.

The security police heard the machine guns and opened fire once more.

Baranovich hadn’t been expecting quite such an emphatic rejoinder from the forces of law and order—these modern weapons were so fearsomely powerful. Twice now the weakened framework had shifted around him, forcing him to snatch at the girders and reinforce their solidity with his energistic power. That was dangerous. The metal was grounding out the EE rounds, and while he was some distance away from their impact zone, those kind of voltages were lethal to a possessed and it only took one wild shot.

When the second round of shooting started he jumped down onto the nearest walkway and sprinted away. His impressive costume’s shiny leather boots changed to yankee-style trainers with inch-thick soles; a fervent hope in his mind that imagined rubber would be as effective an insulator as the real stuff. He could sense others of his group on the move, shaken by the ferocity of the attack.

Joshua looked up to see the last frayed streamers of electrons writhing down the metal pillars. The whole of the smashed-up framework above and around him was grinding loudly. It was going to collapse any second. Self-preservation kicked in strong—fuck Mzu, I’m going to die if I stay here. He scrambled to his feet and slapped Melvyn, who still had his hands over his head, face jammed against the floor.

“Shift it, both of you, now!” He started running, out from under the framework, and angling away from the gigantic hole the police had blown in the wall. There were a lot of footsteps splashing through the puddles behind him. He scanned around quickly. It wasn’t just Melvyn, Dahybi, and Keaton who were following him; all the agency operatives and Mzu’s wacko entourage were coming too. Everybody racing across the Disassembly Shed’s high bay floor in pursuit as if he were showing them the way to salvation. “Jesus wept!” He didn’t want this! Just having Melvyn and Dahybi coming with him across an open space would have proved tempting for the possessed, but Mzu too . . .

Unlike the Baranovich group who had set up the meeting, the ESA and the Edenists who had unlimited access to the Kulu embassy’s memory files, and the security police who knew their home territory, Joshua didn’t quite appreciate the layout of the Disassembly Sheds. Even their madcap drive through the foundry yard hadn’t conclusively demonstrated to him that the canals ran straight through the centre of every shed. So he certainly didn’t know that the only way over the water was a bridge which ran along the door above the smaller canal.

What he did know was that there was a perilously dark and wide gulf in the floor ahead of him, and getting closer very fast. Only now did he hear the gentle slopping of the water, and realize what it was. He nearly went sprawling headlong as he came to a confounded halt a metre from the edge, arms flapping eccentrically for balance. He turned to see everyone rushing en masse towards him, because they’d thought he knew what he was doing, and there hadn’t been time to ask questions. Behind them, Baranovich’s possessed were mustering on the walkway, garish costumes agleam in the rainy dusk.

Alkad was running with her head ducked down, forcing her game leg along. Gelai and Ngong were on either side of her, holding her tight. A bubble of air around the three of them swirled with tiny glimmers of silver light.

Baranovich’s laughter poured out into the vast enclosed space of the central high bay. He pointed, and Joshua could do nothing but stare dumbly as the bolt of white fire streaked across the intervening space straight at him.

Dick Keaton was leading the pack of desperadoes on the floor of the high bay, running hard. He was less than four metres from an aghast Joshua when Baranovich’s fire bolt hit the data security expert clean between his shoulder blades. It burst open in a spectacular cloud of dancing twisters that drained away into the drizzle. And Dick Keaton was completely unharmed.

“Close one,” he jeered happily. His arms wrapped around Joshua, momentum carrying the pair of them over the edge of the central basin just as the mutilated framework collapsed. Fractured girders were tossed out of the crumpling wreckage in all directions, clanging loudly as they hit the floor. A huge split tore up the wall like a lightning bolt in reverse. It was a hundred and seventy metres high when it finally stopped. The framework structure settled into an uneasy silence.

The black water in the ironberg basin was freezing. Joshua yelled out as it closed around him, seeing bubbles bumble past his face. The cold shock was intense enough to make his heart jump—frightening him badly. Salt water rushed into his open mouth. And—Jesus, thank you —his neural nanonics came back on-line.

Nerve impulse overrides squeezed his throat muscles tight, preventing any water flooding his lungs. Analysis of his spinning inner ears revealed his exact orientation. His thrashing became purposeful, shunting him straight up.