“Time to go,” said Lazlo, and disappeared below like a rat down a hole.

Orr made an obscene gesture in his wake.

“What you bring us up here in the first place for, you’re in such a fucking hurry to get off?”

An indistinct answer floated back up. Feet clattered on the companionway.

“Ah, let him go,” said Kiyoka. “No one rolls ‘til we talk to Kurumaya anyway. There’ll be a queue around the ‘fab.”

Orr looked at Sylvie. “What are we going to do about Jad?”

“Leave her here.” The command head was gazing out at the ugly grey bubblefab settlement with a curiously rapt expression on her face. Hard to believe it was the view—maybe she was listening to the machine systems talk, senses open and lost in the wash of transmission traffic. She snapped out of it abruptly and turned to face her crew. “We’ve got the cabins ‘til noon. No point in moving her until we know what we’re doing.”

“And the hardware?”

Sylvie shrugged. “Same applies. I’m not carting that lot around Drava all day while we wait for Kurumaya to give us a slot.”

“Think he’ll ramp us again?”

“After last time? Somehow I doubt it.”

Below deck, the narrow corridors were plugged up with jostling deComs, carry-on gear slung across shoulders or portered on heads.

Cabin doors stood folded open, occupants within rationalising baggage prior to launching themselves into the crush. Boisterous shouts ricocheted back and forth over heads and angled cases. Motion was sludgily forward and port, towards the debarkation hatch. We threaded ourselves into the crowd and crept along with it, Orr in the lead. I hung back, protecting my wounded ribs as much as I could. Occasional jolts got through. I rode it with gritted teeth.

What seemed like a long time later, we spilled out the end of the debarkation corridor and stood amidst the bubblefabs. The deCom swarm drifted ahead of us, through the ‘fabs and towards the centre mast.

Part way there, Lazlo sat waiting for us on a gutted plastic packing crate.

He was grinning.

“What kept you?”

Orr feinted at him with a growl. Sylvie sighed.

“At least tell me you got a queue chip.”

Lazlo opened his hand with the solemnity of a conjuror and presented a little fragment of black crystal on his palm. The number fifty-seven resolved itself from a blurred point of light inside. A string of muttered curses smoked off Sylvie and her companions at the sight.

“Yeah, it’ll be a while.” Lazlo shrugged. “Leftovers from yesterday. They’re still assigning the backlog. I heard something serious went down inside the Cleared Zone last night. We may as well eat.”

He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap moulded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out towards us, pungent enough to trigger even the meagre taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.

“Misos and rice all round?” asked Lazlo.

Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.

“Hey. On me, this.”

“Thanks.”

“No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.”

“Well, there was a lot going on.”

“Yeah. You want anything else?”

There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own and tossed it onto the counter.

“So you got tagged.”

“Yeah. Ribs.”

“Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?”

“No. Before that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Busy man.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” I tore dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.

The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering.

Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-Years jazz.

Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place—old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-Years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualised. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.

“This is old,” I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.

Lazlo grunted. “Welcome to New Hok.”

Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.

“You like this stuff, huh?” Kiyoka asked me through a mouthful of rice.

“Stuff like it. I don’t recognise—”

“Dizzy Csango and Great Laughing Mushroom,” said Orr unexpectedly. “Down the Ecliptic. But it’s a cover of a Blackman Taku float, originally. Taku never would have let the violin in the front door.”

I shot the giant a strange look.

“Don’t listen to him.” Sylvie told me, scratching idly under her hair.

“You go back to early Taku and Ide stuff, they’ve got that gypsy twang scribbled all over the place. They only phased it out for the Millsport sessions.”

“That isn’t—”

“Hey, Sylvie!” A youngish-looking command head with hair static stacked straight up paused at the table. There was a tray of coffees balanced on his left hand and a thick coil of livecable slung over his right shoulder, twitching restlessly. “You guys back already?”

Sylvie grinned. “Hey Oishii. Miss me?”

Oishii made a mock-bow. The tray on his splayed fingers never shifted.

“As ever. More than can be said for Kurumaya-san. You plan on seeing him today?”

“You don’t?”

“Nah, we’re not going out. Kasha caught some counterint splash last night, it’ll be a couple of days before she’s up and about. We’re kicking back.” Oishii shrugged. “It’s paid for. Contingency funding.”

“Fucking contingency fund?” Orr sat up. “What happened here yesterday?”

“You guys don’t know?” Oishii looked around the table, eyes wide. “About last night. You didn’t hear?”

“No,” said Sylvie patiently. “Which is why we’re asking you.”

“Oh, okay. I thought everyone would know by now. We’ve got a coop cluster on the prowl. Inside the Cleared Zone. Last night it started putting together artillery. Self-propelled gun, a big one. Scorpion chassis. Kurumaya had to scramble everybody before we got shelled.”

“Is there anything left?” asked Orr.

“They don’t know. We took down the primary assemblers along with the gun, but a lot of the smaller stuff scattered. Drones, secondaries, shit like that. Someone said they saw karakuri.”

“Oh crabshit,” Kiyoka snorted.

Oishii shrugged again. “Just what I heard.”

“Mech puppets? No fucking way.” Kiyoka was warming to her theme.

“There haven’t been any karakuri in the CZ for better than a year.”

“Haven’t been any co-op machines either,” pointed out Sylvie. “Shit happens. Oishii, you think there’s any chance we’ll get assigned today?”