“Good to know,” I said. “Give me two shakes.”
“Two shakes of what?” he asked, and I realized I might be the only one who said that.
It sent an unexpected pang of homesickness through me, and I paused to brush it away.
“Thirty seconds,” I explained. “I meant thirty seconds.”
“Okay. Thirty seconds, it is,” and I knew I could hold him to that.
I dived further into the system, not happy to see strings of foreign code woven through the code that used to be so familiar. Fuck this. I wound around it, working my way to the operations center for the hangar bay doors.
There was still plenty of foreign code, here—and it looked as spiky as Hell… and sticky. Why the fuck would it look sticky? I mean how the fuck was it doing that? And what would it mean if I touched it?
I rippled round it, brushing far closer than I’d calculated, and that was when I realized the arach code was moving. In fact, it was more than moving, it was… Was that a tendril?
Fuck!
I dodged the first clumsy strike, and forgot about being subtle.
“They know we’re in the system!” I yelled, alerting both Rohan and Askavor to the fact, “… and they’re not friendly!”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Rohan snapped back, and I heard what might have been a distant wuff. “Cascade!”
Cascade, huh? I thought, dodging another tendril and grabbing hold of the hangar bay door controls—ALL the hangar bay door controls.
Suck. On. This!
And I tweaked them all at once. I thought about ripping the code to shreds so the doors would stay open, but decided against it. None of the wasps were wearing suits, and I hadn’t seen any on board for humans. My mind might be in the system, but my very vulnerable fleshy bits were on the drop-ship… which… I had to get into the hangar and safely landed.
Oh, crap.
I’d have to get clear of this mess, in order to do that. Mental presence, or not, it wasn’t like I could switch instantaneously between systems. It’s not like they were inside my head. I mean, the code was located physically somewhere I had to get to, in order to tweak it.
“Ten seconds, Cutter,” Tek said. “Ten seconds and then you smear us all over the deck or the side of the ship….”
Well, fuck it.
Using Tek’s timing, I added another ten seconds, and set a timer for the system to close the hangar doors—all at once—and then I punched out of there as hard and fast as I could. From somewhere down the link, I thought I could hear Cascade barking, and Rohan yelling for him to come back. I wondered where the two of them had stashed their bodies, and if Cascade had its own little nanite swarm to augment its own attempts at security.
“Focus!” Rohan shouted, “and hurry up. That shit is live!”
I hurried. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to access a link, and then get back through. Your conscious is kinda in two places… and that’s only if you’re like Tens or Delight. If you’re more like me, then you pretty much send most of your head, your soul, if you like, into the machine – you take your brain for a walk. Some of you might remain with your body, but I can’t be sure. There have been days when I’ve been so lost in the code that I needed a map to get back… just don’t tell Tens that, okay?
“Don’t tell Tens what?” and that’s when I realized Tens had beaten his way into my implant, and found the link I’d made into the ship—his ship, because he was as protective as Hell of the security systems. “What the fuck?”
“Get out of here, Tens!” and I rolled under his presence, and dived towards the entrance to my implant, all too aware of the shadow coming towards me from the other end—the three shadows.
“Tens!” Rohan shouted. “Just grab her and get. Let the spider deal with it. Cascade: Fetch!”
Well, that was something new. I’ve never been fetched, before—grabbed by code, and shaken about, yes, but never grabbed and pulled up the data-stream to where I wanted to be. Since when had the pup gotten so big?
“Since he was engineered that way,” Rohan said, and I heard pride in his voice, before he turned away to praise his pet. “Good boy, Cascade. Good boy!”
But Cascade wasn’t waiting to be praised. He was back down the link, on Askavor’s trail, and I remembered what I’d told him. Damn.
“Cascade!” I called. “Come!”
I watched the code wriggle to a stop.
“Come!”
“Five.” Tek’s voice was not a welcome intrusion.
“Askavor, you’re needed!” and I slipped back into my implant, and into the drop-ship’s CPU.
Tek got to three, before I had the ship touching down in the bay, not quite as lightly as a feather, but light enough that it could fly, again. I even remembered to leave enough room beside it for the second shuttle to land—if the queen got this far.
Right now, though, it looked like we were on our own.
And we had some arach butt to kick.
10—The Battle for the Shady Marie
I still hadn’t worked out where the drop-ships had come from, but it didn’t matter. Tovy was already carrying what looked like a heavy set of saddle bags.
“Med kits, blood replacement, emergency nans,” he said, as he draped four Blazers over my shoulders, handed me a pouch of energy clips and solids, and then passed me two long blades and two short.
“In case they get close.”
I figured that, if they got close enough for me to use the blades, I was in trouble I probably wouldn’t get out of.
“Your Mack will need arming.”
Well, that explained the extra weaponry.
“And your Tens.”
There was no way in Hell Tens was getting a blade.
“Hey!”
As I ran down the loading ramp with Askavor beside me, and Tovy hovering at my back,
