Broken Angels

CHAPTER NINE

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.”

The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was moulded in lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. “Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-metre pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.” Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artefact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. “Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.”

“Well you never know,” I said easily. “No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.”

“Oh, quite.” He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. “But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiselled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. “Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.”

The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.

“Not one of yours?” I asked.

“Hardly.” Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. “You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?”

“I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.”

Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrelled hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniperscope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.

Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past a hundred and fifty and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded towards the figure.

“There you are. The corrosion begins.” He started to eat. “Shall we get down to business then?”

“Fair enough.” I tossed something across the table to him. “That’s yours, I think.”

It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.

“Deng?”

I nodded.

“What did you get out of him?”

“Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.” I shrugged. “He dropped your name before he realised I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.”

Hand’s expression turned sceptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.

“Did you really have to shoot them all?” he asked finally.

I shrugged. “That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.”

“Ah, yes.” He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. “So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?”

I shrugged again. “Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.”

“And are you?”

“No. This is strictly personal.”

“And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?”

“Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it.”

There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.

“Yes,” he murmured. “That is so very elegant. Congratulations, lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.”

“Yes, I could.” I smiled back. “But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.”

“Be quiet.” Hand’s voice stayed gentle, but there was a sudden spike of steel under the suave tones. “We’re in the open here. If you want to do business with Mandrake, you’re going to have to learn a little discretion. No more specifics, please.”

“Fine. Just as long as we understand each other.”

“I think we do.”

“I hope so.” I let my own tone harden a little. “You underestimated me when you sent the goon squad out last night. Don’t do it again.”

“I wouldn’t dream—”

“That’s good. Don’t even dream about it, Hand. Because what happened to Deng and his pals last night doesn’t come close to some of the unpleasantries I’ve been party to in the last eighteen months up north. You may think the war’s a long way off right now, but if Mandrake tries to shaft me or my associates again, you’ll have a Wedge wake-up call rammed so far up your arse you’ll be able to taste your own shit in the back of your throat. Now, do we understand each other?”

Hand made a pained face. “Yes. You’ve made your point very graphically. I assure you, there will be no more attempts to cut you out of the loop. That’s provided your demands are reasonable, of course. What kind of finder’s fee were you looking for?”

“Twenty million UN dollars. And don’t look at me like that, Hand. It’s not even a tenth per cent of what Mandrake stands to make from this, if we’re successful.”

Up on the holo, the asking price seemed to have braked at a hundred and nine and the auctioneer was now coaxing it upward a fraction at a time.

“Hmm.” Hand chewed and swallowed while he thought about it. “Cash on delivery?”

“No. Up front, on deposit in a Latimer City bank. One-way transfer, standard seven-hour reversibility limit. I’ll give you the account codes later.”

“That’s presumptuous, lieutenant.”

“Call it insurance. Not that I don’t trust you, Hand, but I’ll feel happier knowing you’ve already made the payment. That way, there’s no percentage in Mandrake fucking me over after the event. You don’t stand to gain anything from it.”

The Mandrake exec grinned wolfishly. “Trust works both ways, lieutenant. Why should we pay you before the project matures?”

“Other than because if you don’t I’ll walk away from this table and you’ll lose the biggest R&D coup the Protectorate has ever seen, you mean?” I let that sink in for a moment before I hit him with the relaxant. “Well, look at it this way. I can’t access the money from here as long as the war’s on; the Emergency Powers Directive ensures that. So your money’s gone, but I don’t have it either. To get paid, I have to be on Latimer. That’s your guarantee.”

“You want to go to Latimer as well?” Hand raised an eyebrow. “Twenty million UN and passage offworld?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Hand. What did you expect? You think I want to wait around until Kemp and the Cartel finally decide it’s time to negotiate instead of fight? I don’t have that kind of patience.”

“So.” The Mandrake exec set down his chopsticks and steepled his hands on the table. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We pay you twenty million UN dollars, now. That’s non-negotiable.”

I looked back at him, waiting.

“Is that right?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll stop you if you get off track.”

The faint there-and-gone smile again. “Thank you. Then, upon successful completion of this project, we undertake to freight you, and presumably your associates, by needlecast to Latimer. Are those all of your demands?”

“Plus decanting.”

Hand looked at me strangely. I guessed he wasn’t used to his negotiations taking this path.

“Plus decanting. Any specifics I should know about there?”

I shrugged. “Selected sleeves, obviously, but we can discuss the specifics later. Doesn’t have to be custom. Something top of the range, obviously, but off the rack will do fine.”

“Oh, good.”

I felt a grin floating up, tickling the inner surfaces of my belly. I let it surface. “Come on Hand. You’re getting a fucking bargain, and you know it.”

“So you say. But it isn’t that simple, lieutenant. We’ve checked the Landfall artefact registry for the past five years, and there’s no trace of anything like the item you describe.” He spread his hands. “No evidence. You can see my position.”

“Yeah, I can. In about two minutes you’re about to lose the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years, and you’re going to do it because there’s nothing in your files about it. If that’s your position, Hand, I’m dealing with the wrong people.”

“Are you saying this find went unregistered? In direct breach of the Charter?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we sent you looked real enough for either you or your pet AI to authorise a full urban commando strike inside half an hour. Maybe the files got wiped, maybe they were corrupted or stolen. Why am I even discussing this? Are you going to pay us, or are you going to walk?”

Silence. He was pretty good—I still couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. He hadn’t shown me a single genuine emotion since we sat down. I waited. He sat back and brushed something invisible from his lap.

“I’m afraid this will require some consultation with my colleagues. I’m not authorised to sign off on deals of this magnitude, with this little up front. Authorisation for the DHF needlecasting alone will need—”

“Crap.” I kept it friendly. “But go ahead. Consult. I can give you half an hour.”

“Half an hour?”

Fear—the tiniest flicker of it at the narrowed corners of his eyes, but it was there and I felt the satisfaction come surging up from my stomach in the wake of the grin, savage with nearly two years of suppressed rage.

Got you, motherfucker.

“Sure. Thirty minutes. I’ll be right here. I hear the green tea sorbet’s pretty good in this place.”

“You’re not serious.”

I let the savagery corrode the edge of my voice. “Sure, I’m serious. I warned you about that. Don’t underestimate me again, Hand. You get me a decision inside thirty minutes or I walk out of here and go talk to someone else. I might even stiff you with the bill.”

He jerked his head irritably.

“And who would you go to?”

“Sathakarn Yu? PKN?” I gestured with my chopsticks. “Who knows? But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll work something out. You’ll be busy enough trying to explain to the policy board how you let this slip through your fingers. Won’t you?”

Matthias Hand compressed a breath and got up. He sorted out a thin smile and flashed it at me.

“Very well. I’ll be back shortly. But you have a little to learn about the art of negotiation, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

“Probably. Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time up north.”

I watched him walk away between the potential buyers on the balcony, and could not repress a faint shiver. If I was going to get my face lasered off, there was a good chance it would happen now.

I was banking hard on an intuition that Hand had licence from the policy board to do pretty much what he wanted. Mandrake was the commercial world’s equivalent of Carrera’s Wedge, and you had to assume a corresponding approach to latitudes of initiative at executive levels. There was really no other way for a cutting-edge organism to work.

Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.

Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.

Right, Takeshi?

My face twitched.

If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent re-sleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.

Don’t expect anything and—

And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.

Don’t—

Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.

This fucking war.

And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colours. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.

Sold.

CHAPTER TEN

Dangrek.

The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.

A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.

“Should be colder than this,” he said.

“Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.” I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. “This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?”

“Not as yet.” Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. “Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes…”

He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.

“It’ll do,” she said distantly. “I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.”

“Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.” A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.

“Yes.” Another pause. “Of course. This way.”

She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.

A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.

I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.

We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—

I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.

“Hand. What’s that?”

“That?” He saw where I was pointing. “Oh, that. Grey area.”

“I can see that.” Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. “What’s it doing there?”

But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the pre-knowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rock fall.

Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.

“It’s Sauberville,” she said flatly. “Isn’t it?”

Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. “That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The MAI posits a fifty per cent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.”

A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of a hundred and twenty thousand.

“Reduced how?” I asked.

Hand shrugged. “It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.”

“Tactical nuke,” said Schneider tonelessly. “Riding a marauder delivery system.”

“Well, it’s what he’s got.” Hand shrugged again. “And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.”

“Motherfucking psycho,” said Schneider, apparently to the sky.

Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she was trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.

“So.” Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. “Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.”

Wardani turned away. “It’s down on the beach,” she said.

The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale blue shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practised flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.

We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. She was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.

“That’s it.” She nodded ahead. “That’s where we buried it.”

“Buried it?” Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. “How exactly did you bury it?”

Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. “Use your eyes, man. How do you think?”

“You blew it up?”

“Bored charges.” Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. “Two metres in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.”

“You.” Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. “Blew up. An artefact?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.” Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. “Where do you think we found the fucking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery—this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.”

“I hope you’re right.” Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. “Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million UN dollars for damaged goods.”

“What brought the rock down?” I asked suddenly.

Schneider turned, grinning. “I told you, man. Bored—”

“No.” I was looking at Tanya Wardani. “I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction under water, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?”

“Yeah, Tanya,” Schneider nodded vigorously. “You never did nail that one, did you? I mean we talked about it, but…”

“It’s a good point.” Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. “What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?”

The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.

“Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.”

I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. “Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.”

“Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.”

“Leakage?” asked Hand dubiously.

Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy now Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the packet, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.

“Look,” she said finally, “This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does, at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.”

When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.

“Alright. How long does a heavy load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.” She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. “Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, metres wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours, that’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?”

“A lot of energy,” said Hand impatiently. “So what’s this about leakage?”

“Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.”

“Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. “And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ‘cast duration of a few seconds, well, it doesn’t add up to much air time. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilisation with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.”

“Oops.”

The archaeologue nicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.

“Quite,” she said acidly. “Oops. Now the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.”

I nodded. “So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—”

“And buries itself under five hundred thousand tonnes of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Wardani.”

The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. “I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.”

“Or,” said Schneider brightly. “It could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?”

“We already talked about this, Jan.” Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. “It’s not—”

“It’s possible, alright.”

“Yes. It’s just not very likely.” She turned away from Schneider and faced me. “It’s hard to be sure—a lot of the glyphs were like nothing I’d ever seen before, and they’re hard to read, but I’m pretty certain there’s a power brake built in. Above certain velocities, nothing gets through.”

“You don’t know that for certain,” Schneider was sulking. “You said yourself you couldn’t—”

“Yes, but it makes sense, Jan. You don’t build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you’re likely to find out there.”

“Oh, come on Tanya, what about—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs,” said Hand loudly. “Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I’d like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Sure.”

We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand’s shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out of nowhere, Hand spoke.

“Remarkable woman.”

I grunted.

“I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigours of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon…”

“She’ll be fine,” I said shortly.

“Yes, I’m sure she will.” A delicate pause. “I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.”

“That’s over, I think.”

“Oh, really?”

There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.

“About this military perspective, Hand.”

“Oh, yes.” The Mandrake exec stopped a few metres short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. “I’m not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn’t ideal fighting ground.”

“Got it in one.” I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. “Once we get down here, we’re a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It’s an open field of fire right back to the foothills.”

“And then there’s the sea.”

“And then there’s the sea,” I echoed gloomily. “We’re open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we’ll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That’s unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.”

“Hmm.” Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. “I’ve talked to the lawyers.”

“Did you disinfect afterwards?”

“Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artefact in non-orbital space is only considered valid if a rally operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometre of said artefact. No loopholes, we’ve looked. If there’s a starship on the other side of this gate, we’re going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that’s going to take some time.”

I shrugged. “A small army, then.”

“A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It’ll show up on satellite tracking like a holowhore’s chest. And we can’t really afford that, can we?”

“A holowhore’s chest? I don’t know, the surgery can’t be that expensive.”

Hand cocked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. “Very droll. Thank you. We can’t really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?”

“Not if you want an exclusive.”

“I think that goes without saying, lieutenant.” Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. “So then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit.”

“If we want to come out alive, yes.”

“Yes.” Unexpectedly, Hand rocked back on his heels and dumped himself into a sitting position in the sand. He rested his forearms on his knees and seemed lost in searching the horizon for something. In the dark executive suit and white winged collar, he looked like a sketch by one of the Millsport absurdist school.

“Tell me, lieutenant,” he said finally. “Assuming we can get the peninsula cleared, in your professional opinion, what’s the lower limit on a support team for this venture? How few can we get away with?”

I thought about it. “If they’re good. Spec ops, not just plankton-standard grunts. Say six. Five, if you use Schneider as flyer.”

“Well, he doesn’t strike me as the sort to be left behind while we look after his investment for him.”

“No.”

“You said spec ops. Do you have any specific skills in mind?”

“Not really. Demolitions, maybe. That rock fall looks pretty solid. And it wouldn’t hurt if a couple of them could fly a shuttle, just in case something happens to Schneider.”

Hand twisted his head round to look up at me. “Is that likely?”

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Dangerous world out there.”

“Indeed.” Hand went back to watching the place where the sea met the grey of Sauberville’s undecided fate. “I take it you’ll want to do the recruiting yourself.”

“No, you can run it. But I want to sit in, and I want veto on anyone you select. You got any idea where you’re going to get half a dozen spec ops volunteers? Without ringing any alarm bells, I mean.”

For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me. The horizon seemed to have him body and soul. Then he shifted slightly and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“In these troubled times,” he murmured, almost to himself, “it shouldn’t be a problem finding soldiers who won’t be missed.”

“Glad to hear it.”

He glanced up again and there were still traces of the smile clinging to his mouth.

“Does that offend you, Kovacs?”

“You think I’d be a lieutenant in Carrera’s Wedge if I offended that easily?”

“I don’t know.” Hand looked back out to the horizon again. “You’ve been full of surprises so far. And I understand that Envoys are generally pretty good at adaptive camouflage.”

So.

Less than two full days since the meeting in the auction hall, and Hand had already penetrated the Wedge datacore and unpicked whatever shielding Carrera had applied to my Envoy past. He was just letting me know.

I lowered myself to the blued sand beside him and picked my own point on the horizon to stare at.

“I’m not an Envoy any more.”

“No. So I understand.” He didn’t look at me. “No longer an Envoy, no longer in Carrera’s Wedge. This rejection of groupings is verging on pathological, lieutenant.”

“There’s no verging about it.”

“Ah. I see some evidence of your Harlan’s World origins emerging. The essential evil of massed humanity, wasn’t that what Quell called it?”

“I’m not a Quellist, Hand.”

“Of course not.” The Mandrake exec appeared to be enjoying himself. “That would necessitate being part of a group. Tell me, Kovacs, do you hate me?”

“Not yet.”

“Really? You surprise me.”

“Well, I’m full of surprises.”

“You honestly have no feelings of rancour towards me after your little run-in with Deng and his squad.”

I shrugged again. “They’re the ones with the added ventilation.”

“But I sent them.”

“All that shows is a lack of imagination.” I sighed. “Look, Hand. I knew someone in Mandrake would send a squad, because that’s the way organisations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn’t have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully’s nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully’s wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don’t hate you personally, because you haven’t given me any reason to yet.”

“But you hate Mandrake.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says, rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?”

“People.”

“That’s right. People. It’s all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision-maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I’ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I’ll take them all down if I can. But don’t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.”

“How very balanced of you.”

“Your government would call it antisocial derangement, and put me in a camp for it.”

Hand’s lip curled. “Not my government. We’re just wet-nursing these clowns till Kemp calms down.”

“Why bother? Can’t you deal direct with Kemp?”

I wasn’t looking, but I got the sense that his gaze had jerked sideways as I said it. It took him a while to formulate a response he was happy with.

“Kemp is a crusader,” he said finally. “He has surrounded himself with others like him. And crusaders do not generally see sense until they are nailed to it. The Kempists will have to be defeated, bloodily and resoundingly, before they can be brought to the negotiating table.”

I grinned. “So you’ve tried.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. You didn’t.” I found a violet pebble in the sand and tossed it into the placid ripples in front of us. Time to change the subject. “You didn’t say when you were going to get our spec ops escort, either.”

“Can’t you guess?”

“The soul markets?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

I shook my head, but inside me something smoked off the detachment like stubborn embers.

“By the way.” Hand twisted around to look back at the rock fall. “I have an alternative explanation for that collapsed cliff.”

“You didn’t buy the micrometeorite, then?”

“I am inclined to believe in Mistress Wardani’s velocity brake. It makes sense. As does her circuit-breaker theory, to a point.”

“That point being?”

“That if a race as advanced as the Martians appear to have been built a circuit breaker, it would work properly. It would not leak.”

“No.”

“So we are left with the question. Why, fifty thousand years ago, did this cliff collapse. Or perhaps, why was it collapsed?”

I groped around for another pebble. “Yeah, I wondered about that.”

“An open door to any given set of coordinates across interplanetary, possibly even interstellar distances. That’s dangerous, conceptually and in fact. There’s no telling what might come through a door like that. Ghosts, aliens, monsters with half-metre fangs.” He glanced sideways at me. “Quellists, even.”

I found a second, larger stone somewhere back behind me.

“Now that would be bad,” I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. “The end of civilisation as we know it.”

“Precisely. Something which the Martians, no doubt, also thought of and built for. Along with the power brake and the circuit breaker, they would presumably have a monster-with-half-metre-fangs contingency system.”

From somewhere Hand produced a pebble of his own and spun it out over the water. It was a good throw from a seated position, but it still fell a little short of the ripples I had created with my last stone. Wedge-customised neurachem—hard to beat. Hand clucked in disappointment.

“That’s some contingency system,” I said. “Bury your gate under half a million tonnes of cliff face.”

“Yes.” He was still frowning at the impact site of his throw, watching as his ripples merged with mine. “It makes you wonder what they were trying to shut out, doesn’t it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

You like him, don’t you?”

It was an accusation, dealt face up in the low gleam from the muffled illuminum bar top. Music twanged, irritatingly sweet, from speakers not nearly high enough above our heads. Crouched at my elbow like a large comatose beetle, the personal space resonance scrambler that Mandrake had insisted we carry at all times showed a clear green functioning light, but apparently wasn’t up to screening out external noise. Pity.

“Like who?” I asked, turning to face Wardani.

“Don’t be obtuse, Kovacs. That slick streak of used coolant in a suit. You’re fucking bonding with him.”

I felt the corner of my mouth quirk. If Tanya Wardani’s archaeologue lectures had seeped into some of Schneider’s speech patterns during their previous association, it looked as if the pilot had given as good as he’d got.

“He’s our sponsor, Wardani. What do you want me to do? Spit at him every ten minutes to remind us all how morally superior we are?” I tugged significantly at the shoulder flash of the Wedge uniform I was wearing. “I’m a paid killer, Schneider here is a deserter and you, whatever your sins may or may not be, are encoded all the way with us in trading the greatest archaeological find of the millennium for a ticket offworld and a lifetime pass to all the ruling-elite fun-park venues in Latimer City.”

She flinched.

“He tried to have us killed.”

“Well, given the outcome, I’m inclined to forgive him that one. Deng’s goon squad are the ones who ought to be feeling aggrieved.”

Schneider laughed, then shut up as Wardani cut him a freezing stare.

“Yes, that’s right. He sent those men to their deaths, and now he’s cutting a deal with the man who killed them. He’s a piece of shit.”

“If the worst Hand ever scores is eight men sent to their deaths,” I said, more roughly than I’d intended, “then he’s a lot cleaner than me. Or anyone else with a rank that I’ve met recently.”

“You see. You’re defending him. You use your own self-hatred to let him slide off the scope and save yourself a moral judgement.”

I looked hard at her, then drained my shot glass and set it aside with exaggerated care.

“I appreciate,” I said evenly, “that you’ve been through a lot recently, Wardani. That’s why I’m cutting you some slack. But you’re not an expert on the inside of my head, so I’d prefer it if you’d keep your fucking amateur psychosurgeon bullshit to yourself. OK?”

Wardani’s mouth compressed to a thin line. “The fact remains—”

“Guys,” Schneider leaned across Wardani with the rum bottle and filled my glass. “Guys, this is supposed to be a celebration. If you want to fight, go north, where it’s popular. Right here, right now, I’m celebrating the fact I won’t ever have to get in a fight again, and you two are spoiling my run-up. Tanya, why don’t you—”

He tried to top up Wardani’s glass, but she pushed the neck of the bottle aside with the edge of one hand. She was looking at him with a contempt that made me wince.

“That’s all that matters to you, Jan, isn’t it,” she said in a low voice. “Sliding out from under with heavy credit. The quick-fix, short-cut, easy-solution route to some swimming-pool existence at the top of the pile. What happened to you, Jan? I mean, you were always shallow, but…”

She gestured helplessly.

“Thanks, Tanya.” Schneider knocked back his shot, and when I could see his face again, he was grinning fiercely. “You’re right, I shouldn’t be so selfish. I ought to have stuck with Kemp for a while longer. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?”

“Don’t be childish.”

“No, really. I see it all so much more clearly now. Takeshi, let’s go tell Hand we’ve changed our minds. Let’s all go down fighting, it’s so much more significant.” He stabbed a finger at Wardani. “And you. You can go back to the camp we pulled you out of because I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any of this noble suffering.”

“You pulled me out of the camp because you needed me, Jan, so don’t pretend any different.”

Schneider’s open hand was well into the swing before I realised he intended to hit her. My neurachem-aided responses got me there in time to lock down the slap, but I had to lunge across Wardani to do it and my shoulder must have knocked her off the stool. I heard her yelp as she hit the floor. Her drink went over and spilled across the bar.

“That’s enough,” I told Schneider quietly. I had his forearm flattened to the bar under mine, and my other hand floating in a loose fist back at my left ear. My face was close enough to his to see the faint tear sheen on his eyes. “I thought you didn’t want to fight any more.”

“Yeah.” It came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s right.”

I felt him relax, and unlocked on his arm. Turning, I saw Wardani picking her stool and herself up from the floor. Behind her, a few of the bar’s table occupants had come to their feet and were watching uncertainly. I met their eyes, and they seated themselves hurriedly. A graft-heavy tactical marine in one corner lasted longer than the rest, but in the end even she sat down, unwilling to tussle with the Wedge uniform. Behind me, I felt more than saw the bartender clearing up the spilled drink. I leaned back on the newly dried surface.

“I think we’d better all calm down, agreed?”

“Suits me.” The archaeologue set her stool back on its feet. “You’re the one that knocked me over. You and your wrestling partner.”

Schneider had hooked the bottle and was pouring himself another shot. He downed it and pointed at Wardani with the empty glass.

“You want to know what happened to me, Tanya? You—”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“—really want to know? I got to watch a six-year-old-girl. Fucking die of shrapnel. Fucking shrapnel wounds that I fucking inflicted because she was hiding in an automated bunker I rolled fucking grenades into.” He blinked and trickled more rum into his glass. “And I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes. However shallow that makes me. For your fucking information.”

He looked back and forth between us for a couple of seconds, as if he couldn’t honestly remember who either of us were. Then he got off his stool and walked an almost straight line to the door and out. His last drink stood untouched on the muted glow of the bar top.

“Oh shit,” said Wardani, into the small silence left beside the drink. She was peering into her own empty glass as if there might be an escape hatch at the bottom.

“Yeah.” I wasn’t about to help her get off the hook with this one.

“You think I should go after him?”

“Not really, no.”

She put down the glass and fumbled for cigarettes. The Landfall Lights pack I’d noticed in the virtuality came out and she fed herself one mechanically. “I didn’t mean…”

“No, I thought you probably didn’t. So will he, once he sobers up. Don’t worry about it. He’s most likely been carrying that memory around in sealwrap since it happened. You just fed him enough catalyst to vomit it up. Probably better that way.”

She breathed the cigarette into life and glanced sideways at me through the smoke. “Does none of this touch you any more?” she asked. “How long does it take to get like that?”

“Thank the Envoys. It’s their speciality. How long is a meaningless question. It’s a system. Psychodynamic engineering.”

This time she turned on her stool and stayed facing me. “Doesn’t that ever make you angry? That you’ve been tampered with like that?”

I reached across for the bottle, and topped up both our drinks. She made no move to stop me. “When I was younger, I didn’t care. In fact, I thought it was great. A testosterone wet dream. See, before the Envoys, I served in the regular forces and I’d already used a lot of quickplant jack-in software. This just seemed like a super-ramped version of the same thing. Body armour for the soul. And by the time I got old enough to think any differently, the conditioning was in to stay.”

“You can’t beat it? The conditioning?”

I shrugged. “Most of the time, I don’t want to. That’s the nature of good conditioning. And this is a very superior product. I work better when I go with it. Fighting it is hard work, and it slows me down. Where did you get those cigarettes?”

“These?” She looked down at the packet absently. “Oh, Jan, I think. Yeah, he gave them to me.”

“That was nice of him.”

If she noticed the sarcasm in my voice, she didn’t react. “You want one?”

“Why not? By the look of it, I’m not going to be needing this sleeve much longer.”

“You really think we’re going to get as far as Latimer City.” She watched me shake out a cigarette and draw it to life. “You trust Hand to keep his side of this bargain?”

“There’s really very little point in him double crossing us.” I exhaled and stared at the smoke as it drifted away across the bar. A massive sense of departure from something was coursing unlooked-for through my mind, a sense of unnamed loss. I groped after the words to sew everything back together again. “The money’s already gone, Mandrake can’t get it back. So if it cuts us out, all Hand saves himself is the cost of the hypercast and three off-the-rack sleeves. In return for which he gets to worry forever about automated reprisals.”

Wardani’s gaze dropped to the resonance scrambler on the bar. “Are you sure this thing is clean?”

“Nope. I got it from an indie dealer, but she came Mandrake-recommended, so it could be tagged for all I know. It doesn’t really matter. I’m the only person who knows how the reprisals are set up, and I’m not about to tell you about it.”

“Thanks.” There was no appreciable irony in her tone. An internment camp teaches you things about the value of not knowing.

“Don’t mention it.”

“And what about silencing us after the event?”

I spread my hands. “What for? Mandrake isn’t interested in silence. This’ll be the biggest coup a single corporate entity have ever pulled off. It’ll want it known. Those time-locked data launches we set are going to be the oldest news on the block when they finally decay. Once Mandrake has got your starship hidden away somewhere safe, it’ll be dropping the fact through every major corporate dataport on Sanction IV. Hand’s going to use this to swing instant membership of the Cartel, and probably a seat on the Protectorate Commercial Council into the bargain. Mandrake’ll be a major player overnight. Our significance in that particular scheme of things will be nil.”

“Got it all worked out, huh?”

I shrugged again. “This isn’t anything we haven’t already discussed.”

“No.” She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. “I just didn’t think you’d be so, fucking, congenial with that piece of corporate shit.”

I sighed.

“Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He’ll do the job we want him to do. That’s what counts. We’ve been paid, we’re on board and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I’m concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I’ll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?”

Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. “You’d better hope this isn’t tagged. If Hand’s listening to you…”

“Well,” I reached across her and picked up Schneider’s untouched drink. “If he is, he’s probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here’s to mistrust and mutual deterrence.”

I knocked back the rum and upended the glass on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.

“Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need.”

“What you need,” I said, yawning, “is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew.”

“I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn’t an issue.”

I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. “Yeah, well. Probably isn’t, but we’re supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be bloody-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think, want to walk?”

“Going to hold my hand?” It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other’s personal space.

The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.

I turned to crush out my cigarette.

“Sure,” I said, trying for lightness. “It’s dark out there.”

I pocketed the scrambler, and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.

It’s dark out there.

Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The top three floors of the Mandrake Tower were executive residential, access barred from below and topped off with a multilevel roof complex of gardens and cafés. A variable permeate power screen strung from parapet pylons kept the sun fine-tuned for luminous warmth throughout the day, and in three of the cafés, you could get breakfast at any hour. We got it at midday and were still working our way through the last of the spread when an immaculately-attired Hand came looking for us. If he’d been listening in to last night’s character assassination, it didn’t seem to have upset him much.

“Good morning Mistress Wardani. Gentlemen. I trust your night out on the town proved worth the security risk.”

“Had its moments.” I reached out and speared another dim sum parcel with my fork, not looking at either of my companions. Wardani had in any case retreated behind her sunlenses the moment she sat down, and Schneider was brooding intently on the dregs in his coffee cup. The conversation had not been sparkling so far. “Sit down, help yourself.”

“Thank you.” Hand hooked out a chair and seated himself. On closer inspection, he looked a little tired around the eyes. “I’ve already had lunch. Mistress Wardani, the primary components from your hardware list are here. I’m having them brought up to your suite.”

The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.

Don’t ask.

“Well. We’re about ready to recruit, lieutenant, if you—”

“Fine.” I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. “Let’s go.”

No one said anything. Schneider didn’t even look up, but Wardani’s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.

We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator which named each floor for us as we passed it and outlined a few of Mandrake’s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-glass walls of the basement level. Iluminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing and on the far side of the open space a blob of hard sunlight signalled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-coloured cruiser was waiting.

“Thaisawasdi Field,” said Hand, leaning into the driver’s compartment. “The Soul Market.”

The engine note dialled up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automould cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarised glass of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly towards the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiralled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.

Hand touched a stud on the door and the glass polarised blue.

“You were followed last night,” he said matter of factly.

I glanced across the compartment at him. “What for? We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

“Not by us.” He made an impatient gesture. “Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that’s how we spotted them. But I’m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider—which incidentally wasn’t all that intelligent—and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn’t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge.”

“How many?”

“Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved.”

“Did you pick them up?”

“No.” Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. “The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they’d gone to ground near the Latimer canal head and by the time we got there, they were gone. We looked, but…”

He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He’d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Sorry. Just touched. Protect and retrieve, huh?”

“Ha ha.” He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. “So, is there something you want to tell me?”

I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.

“Are you certain?”

“Hand, be serious. If I’d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they’d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?”

“So who were they?”

“I thought I just told you I didn’t know. Street scum, maybe?”

He gave me a pained look. “Street scum following a Carrera’s Wedge uniform?”

“OK, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You’ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven’t you?”

“Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn’t notice them, how likely is it they were that low-grade?”

I sighed. “Not very.”

“Precisely. So who else is trying to carve themselves a slice of artefact pie?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted gloomily.

The rest of the flight passed in silence.

Finally, the cruiser banked about and I tipped a glance out of the window. We were spiralling down towards what looked like a sheet of dirty ice littered with used bottles and cans. I frowned and recalibrated for scale.

“Are these the original—?”

Hand nodded. “Some of them, yes. The big ones. The rest are impounds, stuff from when the bottom fell out of the artefact market. Soon as you can’t pay your landing slot, they grab your haulage and grav-lift it out here until you do. Of course, with the way the market went, hardly anyone bothered even trying to pay off what they owed, so the Port Authority salvage crews went in and decommissioned them with plasma cutters.”

We drifted in over the nearest of the grounded colony barges. It was like floating across a vast felled tree. Up at one end, the thrust assemblies that had propelled the vessel across the gulf between Latimer and Sanction IV were spread like branches, crushed to the landing field underneath and fanned stiffly against the hard blue sky above. The barge would never lift again, had in fact never been intended for more than a one-way trip. Assembled in orbit around Latimer a century ago, built only for the long blast across interstellar space and a single planetfall at journey’s end, she would have burnt out her antigrav landing system coming down. The detonation of the final touchdown repulsor jets would have fused the desert sand beneath into an oval of glass that would eventually be extended by engineers to join the similar ovals left by other barges and so create Thaisawasdi Field, to serve the fledgling colony for the first decade of its life.

By the time the corporates got round to building their own private fields and the associated complexes, the barges would have been gutted, used initially to live out of, then as a ready source of refined alloys and hardware to build from. On Harlan’s World, I’d been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalised, carved back to multilevelled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull. Only the hulls themselves were ever left intact, out of some bizarre quasi-reverence of the kind that in earlier ages got successive generations to give up their lives to build cathedrals.

The cruiser crossed the spine of the barge and slid down the curve of the hull to a soft landing in the pool of shadow cast by the grounded vessel. We climbed out into sudden cool and a quiet broken only by the whisper of a breeze across the glass plain and, faintly, the human sounds of commerce from within the hull.

“This way.” Hand nodded at the curving wall of alloy before us, and strode in towards a triangular cargo vent near ground level. I caught myself scanning the edifice for possible sniper points, shrugged off the reflex irritably and went after him. The wind swept detritus obligingly out of my way in little knee-high swirls.

Close up, the cargo vent was huge, a couple of metres across at its apex and wide enough at base to permit the passage of a trolleyed marauder bomb fuselage. The loading ramp that led up to the entrance had doubled as a hatch when the barge was in flight and now it squatted on massive hydraulic haunches that hadn’t worked in decades. At the top the vent was flanked with carefully blurred holographic images that might have been either Martians or angels in flight.

“Dig art,” said Hand disparagingly. Then we were past them and into the vaulted gloom beyond.

It was the same feeling of decayed space that I’d seen on Harlan’s World, but where the Harlan fleet hulks had been preserved with museum sobriety, this space was filled with a chaotic splatter of colour and sound. Stalls built from bright primary plastics and wire were cabled and epoxied seemingly at random up the curve of the hull and across what remained of the principal decks, giving the impression that a colony of poisonous mushrooms had infected the original structure. Sawn-off sections of companionway and ladders of welded support struts linked it all together. Here and there more holographic art lent extra flare to the glow of lamps and illuminum strips. Music wailed and basslined unpredictably from hull-mounted speakers the size of crates. High above it all, someone had punched metre-width holes in the hull alloy so that beams of solid sunlight blasted through the gloom at tall angles.

At the impact point of the closest beam stood a tall, raggedly dressed figure, sweat-beaded black face turned up to the light as if it were a warm shower. There was a battered black top hat jammed on his head and an equally well used long black coat draped across his gaunt frame. He heard our steps on the metal and pivoted, arms held cruciform.

“Ah, gentlemen.” The voice was a prosthetic bubbling, emitted by a rather obvious leech unit stapled to the scarred throat. “You are just in time. I am Semetaire. Welcome to the Soul Market.”

Up on the axial deck, we got to watch the process begin.

As we stepped out of the cage elevator, Semetaire moved aside and gestured with one rag-feathered arm.

“Behold,” he said.

Out on the deck, a tracked cargo loader was backing up with a small skip held high in its lifting arms. As we watched, the skip tilted forward and something started to spill over the lip, cascading onto the deck and bouncing up again with a sound like hail stones.

Cortical stacks.

It was hard to tell without racking up the neurachem vision, but most of them looked too bulky to be clean. Too bulky, and too whitish-yellow with the fragments of bone and spinal tissue that still clung to the metal. The skip hinged further back, and the spillage became a rush, a coarse white-noised outpouring of metallic shingle. The cargo loader continued to backtrack, laying a thick, spreading trail of the stuff. The hailstorm built to a quick drumming fury, then choked up as the continuing cascade of stacks was soaked up by the mounds that had already fallen.

The skip up-ended, emptied. The sound stopped.

“Just in,” observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. “Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid deployment casualties as well. We’re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp’s ground cover pretty badly.”

“Not for the first time,” I muttered.

“Nor the last, we hope.” Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. “Business has rarely been this good.”

Something scraped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.

All the way round the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, scraping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel-load rattled in the buckets like gravel.

For all the competition for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I guessed and watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.

“Most sell by gross weight,” he murmured. “It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire.”

“Get to the point,” said Hand curtly.

Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man’s voice. “The point,” he said courteously, “is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire. What do you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf?”

I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.

Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn’t recognise, and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.

“You are playing a dangerous game,” said the Mandrake exec quietly. “And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?”

Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimetres. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.

“Slowly,” I suggested.

“There is no problem here, Kovacs.” Hand’s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire’s. “The family ties have been established now.”

Semetaire’s grin said that wasn’t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn’t show.

“What is it you desire, company man?”

“Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger.”

“He’s not talking to you, Kovacs.” Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. “Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we’re in a hurry. Whatever you’ve got on the slab.”

Semetaire shrugged. “The freshest are here,” he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cylinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. “But if you are pressed for time…”

He turned aside and led us to a sombrely-appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the bass-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors’ shovels and buckets behind us.

Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier and she unwound herself languidly from amongst the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.

I glanced at Hand.

“The chosen of Ogon,” he said, without apparent irony. “Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors.”

He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then, she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.

“How many kilos do you want?” asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.

Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.

“How much are you going to gut me?”

“Seventy-nine fifty the kilo.”

The exec grunted. “Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it.”

“That’s a dross price and you know it, company man.” Semetaire shook his head, smiling. “Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn’t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior class, cleaned and anointed, and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other’s time in this way.”

“Alright,” Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. “You’ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I’ll be back sometime.”

“Sometime.” Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. “Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead.”

“We may indeed.” Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. “And some of us sooner than others, if we go round making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire.”

The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.

“Where would be the point in arresting me?” he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. “Look at this. Without me, you’d only have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy.”

“Sixty-seven fifty, and I’ll make you Mandrake’s preferred supplier.”

Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. “Very well,” he said finally. “Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos.”

“Agreed.” Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. “I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up.”

Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.

“A find,” said Semetaire lightly, and grinned.

One of the crab-legged remotes had returned from the pile and, having reached Semetaire’s foot, was working its way steadily up his trouser leg. When it reached the level of his belt, he plucked it off and held it still while, with the other hand, he prised something from the thing’s mandibles. Then he tossed the little machine away. It drew in its limbs as it sensed the freefall and when it hit the deck, it was a featureless grey ovoid that bounced and rolled to a quick halt. A moment later, the limbs extended cautiously. The remote righted itself and scuttled off about its master’s business.

“Ahhh, look.” Semetaire was rubbing the tissue-flecked stack between his fingers and thumb, still grinning. “Look at that, Wedge Wolf. Do you see? Do you see how the new harvest begins?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Mandrake AI read the stack-stored soldiers we’d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data, and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they’d do would be scream themselves hoarse.

Hand shrugged it off.

“That’s about standard,” he said. “There’s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We’ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters.”

I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers’ data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional analogue.

“Experience of high-rad combat environments?” I looked up at the Mandrake exec. “Is this something I should know about?”

“Come on, Kovacs. You already do.”

“I.” The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn’t seen light so harsh in geological eons. “Had hoped it wouldn’t turn out that way.”

Hand examined the table top as if it needed resheening. “We needed the peninsula cleared,” he said carefully. “By the end of the week it will be. Kemp’s pulling back. Call it serendipity.”

Once, on reconnaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I’d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail—even with the neurachem racked up to maximum the city looked like a silver bracelet, flung down at the water’s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.

I met Hand’s eyes across the table.

“So we’re all going to die.”

He shrugged. “It seems unavoidable, doesn’t it. Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run…”

“Yeah, well in the long run I’ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City.”

“Quite.”

“What kind of rad-tolerant sleeves you have in mind?”

Another shrug. “Don’t know for sure, I’ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?”

I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.

“I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.” I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. “This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don’t build better for combat than this stuff.”

“And the anti-rad?”

“It’ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we’re done?”

Hand frowned at the question. “Well. Employment.”

“They had that. Look where it got them.”

“Employment in Landfall.” For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. “Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Those are three very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don’t really subscribe to any of them. But if you’re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I’d say so. If it were me, I’d probably want in at that price.”

“A vote of confidence.” Hand’s tone was withering. “How reassuring.”

“Provided, of course, I didn’t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the back-data.”

He looked at me. “Are you trying to be funny?”

“I can’t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city.” I shrugged. “Just now, anyway. Maybe that’s just me.”

“Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?”

I smiled thinly. “Don’t be absurd, Hand. I’m a soldier.”

“Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don’t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune.”

“Isn’t it just.” I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it was a fused grenade. “So let’s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?”

According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.

It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.

The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake AI with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us three hundred and eighty-seven possibles, with a high probability core of two hundred and twelve.

“Time to wake them up,” said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.

Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging round the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn’t had that much to say to each other either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scroll down and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.

“Have we really got to talk to all of them?”

Hand shook his head. “No, we really haven’t. There’s a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I’ll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That’s if you trust me that far.”

I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.

“Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?”

We left for the roof.

Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun’s juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening’s warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.

I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.

The language mix reminded me.

“Tell me, Hand.” I broke the seal on a new pack of Landfall Lights and drew one to life. “What was that shit out at the market today? That language the three of you were speaking, the left-handed gestures?”

Hand tasted his coffee and set it down. “You haven’t guessed?”

“Voodoo?”

“You might put it that way.” The pained look on the exec’s face told me he wouldn’t put it that way in a million years. “Though properly speaking it hasn’t been called that for several centuries. Neither was it called that back at the origin. Like most people who don’t know, you’re oversimplifying.”

“I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking.”

He smiled. “If that is the case, then the hard of thinking seem to be in a majority, do they not?”

“They always are.”

“Well, perhaps.” Hand drank more coffee and regarded me over the cup. “You really claim to have no God? No higher power? The Harlanites are mostly Shintoists, aren’t they? That, or some Christian offshoot?”

“I’m neither,” I said flatly.

“Then you have no refuge against the coming of night? No ally when the immensity of creation presses down on the spine of your tiny existence like a stone column a thousand metres tall?”

“I was at Innenin, Hand.” I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. “At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without.”

“God is not ours to command.”

“Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He’s playing a part, right?”

“Yes.” There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand’s voice now. “He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead—”

“Very witty.”

“—in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his competitors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more.” He offered me a slight smile. “Accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste.”

“Strange this Ghede hasn’t got around to making the same point, isn’t it?”

Hand sighed. “Actually, it’s very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humour of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused.”

“Really.” I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. “You believe this shit, right? I mean, seriously?”

The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then he tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.

“Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of god. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?”

I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervour in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.

“Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren’t dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth’s surface or built anything resembling a machine. I’d say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here.”

Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself “That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in pre-industrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has travelled, from where and for how long. We walk amidst the ruins of a civilisation that apparently had godlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords—”

“Whoa.” I lifted my hands, palms out. “Let’s damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan’s World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left.”

“Yes.” Hand gestured impatiently. “Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?”

“It’s a fucking machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict—”

“Can you be sure of that?”

He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity stoked.

“Have you ever been to Harlan’s World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I’m telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artefact—”

“What, no more mystical than the songspires?” His voice dropped to a hiss. “Trees of stone that sing to the rising and setting sun? No more mystical than a gate that opens like a bedroom door onto—”

He stopped abruptly and glanced around, face flushing with the near indiscretion. I sat back and grinned at him.

“Admirable passion, for someone in a suit that expensive. So you’re trying to sell me the Martians as voodoo gods. Is that it?”

“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” he muttered, straightening up. “And no, the Martians fit quite comfortably into this world. We don’t need recourse to the places of origin to explain them. I’m just trying to show you how limited your world view is without an acceptance of wonder.”

I nodded.

“Very good of you.” I stabbed a finger at him. “Just do me a favour, Hand. When we get where we’re going, keep this shit stowed, will you. I’m going to have enough to worry about without you weirding out on me.”

“I believe only what I have seen,” he said stiffly. “I have seen Ghede and Carrefour walk amongst us in the flesh of men, I have heard their voices speak from the mouths of the hougan, I have summoned them.”

“Yeah, right.”

He looked at me searchingly, offended belief melting slowly into something else. His voice loosened and flowed down to a murmur. “This is strange, Kovacs. You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe.”

That sat between us for almost a minute before I touched it. The noise from surrounding tables faded out and even the wind out of the north seemed to be holding its breath. Then I leaned forward, speaking less to communicate than to dispel the laser-lit recall in my head.

“You’re wrong, Hand,” I said quietly. “I’d love to have access to all this shit you believe. I’d love to be able to summon someone who’s responsible for this fuck-up of a creation. Because then I’d be able to kill them. Slowly.”

Back in the machine, Hand’s virtual self worked the long shortlist down to eleven. It took nearly three months to do it. Run at the AI’s top capacity of three hundred and fifty times real time, the whole process was over shortly before midnight.

By that time, the intensity of the conversation up on the roof had mellowed, first into an exchange of experiential reverie, a kind of rummaging around in the things we had seen and done that tended to support our individual world views, and thence to increasingly vague observations on life threaded onto long mutual silences as we stared beyond the ramparts of the tower and out into the desert night. Hand’s pocket bleep broke into the powered-down mood like a note shattering glass.

We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand’s virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.

Final selection.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In recall, their faces come back to me.

Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.

The faces of the dead.

Ole Hansen:

Ludicrously pale Caucasian, cropped hair like snow, eyes the calm blue of the digit displays on medical equipment in non-critical mode. Shipped in whole from Latimer with the first wave of cryocapped UN reinforcements, back when everyone thought Kemp was going to be a six-month pushover.

“This had better not be another desert engagement.” There were still patches of sunscorched red across his forehead and cheekbones. “Because if it is, you can just put me back in the box. That cellular melanin itches like fuck.”

“It’s cold where we’re going,” I assured him. “Latimer City winter at warmest. You know your team is dead?”

A nod. “Saw the flash from the ‘copter. Last thing I remember. It figures. Captured marauder bomb. I told them to just blow the motherfucker where it lay. You can’t talk those things round. Too stubborn.”

Hansen was part of a crack demolitions unit called the Soft Touch. I’d heard of them on the Wedge grapevine. They had a reputation for getting it right most of the time. Had had.

“You going to miss them?”

Hansen turned in his seat and looked across the virtual hotel room to the hospitality unit. He looked back at Hand.

“May I?”

“Help yourself.”

He got up and went to the forest of bottles, selected one and poured amber liquid into a tumbler until it was brim full. He raised the drink in our direction, lips tight and blue eyes snapping.

“Here’s to the Soft Touch, wherever their fragmented fucking atoms may be. Epitaph: they should have listened to fucking orders. They’d fucking be here now.”

He poured the drink down his throat in a single smooth motion, grunted deep in his throat and tossed the glass away across the room underhand. It hit the carpeted floor with an undramatic thump and rolled to the wall. Hansen came back to the table and sat down. There were tears in his eyes, but I guess that was the alcohol.

“Any other questions?” he asked, voice ripped.

Yvette Cruickshank:

A twenty-year-old, face so black it was almost blue, bone structure that belonged somewhere on the forward profile of a high-altitude interceptor, a dreadlocked mane gathered up the height of a fist before it spilled back down, hung with dangerous-looking steel jewellery and a couple of spare quickplant plugs, coded green and black. The jacks at the base of her skull showed three more.

“What are those?” I asked her.

“Linguapack, Thai and Mandarin, Ninth Dan Shotokan,” she fingered her way up the braille-tagged feathers in a fashion that suggested she could probably rip and change blind and under fire. “Advanced Field Medic.”

“And the ones in your hair?”

“Satnav interface and concert violin.” She grinned. “Not much call for that one recently, but it keeps me lucky.” Her face fell with comic abruptness that made me bite my lip. “Kept.”

“You’ve requested rapid deployment posts seven times in the last year,” said Hand. “Why is that?”

She gave him a curious look. “You already asked me that.”

“Different me.”

“Oh, I get it. Ghost in the machine. Yeah, well, like I said before. Closer focus, more influence over combat outcomes, better toys. You know, you smiled more the last time I said that.”

Jiang Jianping:

Pale Asiatic features, intelligent eyes with a slightly inward cast, and a light smile. You had the impression that he was contemplating some subtly amusing anecdote he’d just been told. Aside from the callused edges of his hands and a looseness of stance below his black coveralls, there was little to hint at his trade. He looked more like a slightly weary teacher than someone who knew fifty-seven separate ways to make a human body stop working.

“This expedition,” he murmured, “is presumably not within the general ambit of the war. It is a commercial matter, yes?”

I shrugged. “Whole war’s a commercial matter, Jiang.”

“You may believe that.”

“So may you,” said Hand severely. “I am privy to government communiqués at the highest level, and I’m telling you. Without the Cartel, the Kempists would have been in Landfall last winter.”

“Yes. That is what I was fighting to prevent.” He folded his arms. “That is what I died to prevent.”

“Good,” said Hand briskly. “Tell us about that.”

“I have already answered this question. Why do you repeat it?”

The Mandrake exec rubbed at his eye.

“That wasn’t me. It was a screening construct. There hasn’t been time to review the data so, please.”

“It was a night assault in the Danang plain, a mobile relay station for the Kempists’ marauder-bomb management system.”

“You were part of that?” I looked at the ninja in front of me with new respect. In the Danang theatre, the covert strikes on Kemp’s communications net were the only real success the government could claim in the last eight months. I knew soldiers whose lives had been saved by the operation. The propaganda channels had still been trumpeting the news of strategic victory about the time my platoon and I were getting shot to pieces up on the Northern Rim.

“I was honoured enough to be appointed cell commander.”

Hand looked at his palm, where data was scrolling down like some mobile skin disease. Systems magic. Virtual toys.

“Your cell achieved its objectives, but you were killed when they pulled out. How did that happen?”

“I made a mistake.” Jiang enunciated the words with the same distaste he had pronounced Kemp’s name.

“And what was that?” No one could have given the Mandrake exec points for tact.

“I believed the automated sentry systems would deactivate when the station was blown. They did not.”

“Oops.”

He flicked a glance at me.

“My cell could not withdraw without cover. I stayed behind.”

Hand nodded. “Admirable.”

“It was my error. And it was a small price to pay to halt the Kempist advance.”

“You’re not a big Kemp fan, are you, Jiang?” I kept my tone careful. It looked as if we’d got a believer here.

“The Kempists preach a revolution,” he said scornfully, “But what will change if they take power on Sanction IV?”

I scratched my ear. “Well, there’ll be a lot more statues of Joshua Kemp in public places, I imagine. Apart from that, probably not much.”

“Exactly. And for this he has sacrificed how many hundreds of thousands of lives?”

“Hard to say. Look, Jiang, we’re not Kempists. If we get what we want, I can promise you there’ll be a big renewed interest in making sure Kemp gets nowhere near power on Sanction IV. Will that do?”

He placed his hands flat on the table and studied them for a while.

“Do I have an alternative?” he asked.

Ameli Vongsavath:

A narrow, hawk-nosed face the colour of tarnished copper. Hair in a tidy pilot cut that was growing out, henna streaking black. At the back, tendrils of it almost covered the silvered sockets that would take the flight symbiote cables. Beneath the left eye, black tattooed cross-hatching marked the cheekbone where the dataflow filaments would go in. The eye above was a liquid crystal grey, mismatched with the dark brown of the right-hand pupil.

“Hospital stock,” she said, when her augmented vision noticed where I was looking. “I took some fire over Bootkinaree Town last year, and it blew out the dataflow. They patched me up in orbit.”

“You flew back out with blown datafeeds?” I asked sceptically. The overload would have shattered every circuit in her cheekbone and scorched tissue for half a handsbreadth in every direction. “What happened to your autopilot?”

She grimaced. “Fried.”

“So how did you run the controls in that state?”

“I shut down the machine and flew it on manual. Cut back to basic thrust and trim. This was a Lockheed Mitoma—their controls still run manually if you do that.”

“No, I meant how did you run the controls with the state you were in.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “I have a high pain threshold.”

Right.

Luc Deprez:

Tall and untidy, sandy blond hair grown longer than made sense for a battlefield, and in nothing you’d call a style. Face made up of sharp Caucasian angles, long bony nose, lantern jaw, eyes a curious shade of green. Sprawled at ease in the virtual chair, head tilted to one side as if he couldn’t quite make us out in this light.

“So.” He acquired my Landfall Lights from the table with a long arm and shook one out of the packet. “You going to tell me something about this gig?”

“No,” said Hand. “It’s confidential until you’re on board.”

A throaty chuckle amidst smoke as he puffed the cigarette to life. “That’s what you said last time. And like I said to you last time, who the hell am I going to tell, man. You don’t want to hire me, I’m going straight back into the tin can, right?”

“Nonetheless.”

“Alright. So you want to ask me something?”

“Tell us about your last covert assault tag,” I suggested.

“That’s confidential.” He surveyed our unsmiling faces for a moment. “Hey, that was a joke. I already told your partner all about it. Didn’t he brief you?”

I heard Hand make a compressed sound.

“Ah, that was a construct,” I said hurriedly. “We’re hearing this for the first time. Run through it again for us.”

Deprez shrugged. “Sure, why not. Was a hit on one of Kemp’s sector commanders. Inside his cruiser.”

“Successful?”

He grinned at me. “I would say so. The head, you know. It came off.”

“I just wondered. You being dead and all.”

“That was bad luck. The fuck’s blood was deterrent toxin-loaded. Slow-acting. We didn’t find out until we were airborne and heading out.”

Hand frowned. “You got splashed?”

“No, man.” A pained expression flitted across the angular face. “My partner, she caught the spray when the carotid went. Right in the eyes.” He plumed smoke at the ceiling. “Too bad, she was our pilot.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. We flew into the side of a building.” He grinned again. “That was fast-acting, man.”

Markus Sutjiadi:

Beautiful with an uncanny geometric perfection of feature that could have sat alongside Lapinee somewhere in the net. Eyes almond in shade and shape, mouth a straight line, face tending towards an inverted isosceles triangle, blunted at its corners to provide the solid chin and wide forehead, straight black hair plastered down. Features curiously immobile, as if drugged into detachment. A sense of energy conserved, of waiting. The face of a global pin-up who’d played too much competition poker recently.

“Boo!” I couldn’t resist it.

The almond eyes barely flickered.

“There are serious charges outstanding against you,” said Hand with a reproachful glance in my direction.

“Yes.”

We all waited for a moment, but Sutjiadi clearly didn’t think there was any more to say on the subject. I started to like him.

Hand threw out a hand like a conjurer, and a screen evolved into the air just beyond his splayed fingers. More fucking system magic. I sighed and watched as a head and shoulders in a uniform like mine evolved beside a downscroll of biodata. The face was familiar.

“You murdered this man,” Hand said coldly. “Would you like to explain why?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t have to,” I gestured at the face on the screen. “Dog Veutin gets a lot of people that way. I’m just interested to know how you managed to kill him.”

This time, the eyes lost some of their flatness, and his gaze glanced briefly off my Wedge insignia, confused.

“I shot him in the back of the head.”

I nodded. “Shows initiative. Is he really dead?”

“Yes. I used a Sunjet on full charge.”

Hand system-magicked the screen away with a snap of his fingers. “Your brig shuttle may have been shot out of the sky, but the Wedge think your stack probably survived. There’s a reward posted for anyone who turns it up. They still want you for formal execution.” He looked sideways at me. “As I understand it that tends to be a pretty unpleasant business.”

“Yeah, it is.” I’d seen a couple of these object lessons early on in my career with the Wedge. They took a long time.

“I have no interest in seeing you handed over to the Wedge,” said Hand. “But I cannot risk this expedition on a man who will carry insubordination to these extremes. I need to know what happened.”

Sutjiadi was watching my face. I gave him the faintest hint of a nod.

“He ordered my men decimated,” he said tightly.

I nodded again, to myself this time. Decimation was, by all accounts, one of Veutin’s favourite forms of liaison with local troops.

“And why was that?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Hand,” I turned in my seat. “Didn’t you hear him? He was ordered to decimate his command, and he didn’t want to. That kind of insubordination, I can live with.”

“There may be factors which—”

“We’re wasting time,” I snapped, and turned back to Sutjiadi. “Given the same situation again, is there anything you’d do differently?”

“Yes.” He showed me his teeth. I’m not sure I’d call it a grin. “I’d have the Sunjet on wide beam. That way I’d have half-cooked his whole squad, and they wouldn’t have been in any condition to arrest me.”

I tipped a glance back at Hand. He was shaking his head, one hand up to his eyes.

Sun Liping:

Dark Mongol eyes shelved in epicanthic folds on high, broad cheekbones. A mouth poised in a faint downturn that might have been the aftermath of rueful laughter. Fine lines in the tanned skin and a solid fall of black hair draped over one shoulder and held firmly in place by a big silver static field generator. An aura of calm, equally unshakeable.

“You killed yourself?” I asked doubtfully

“So they tell me.” The downturned lips amped up to a crooked grimace. “I remember pulling the trigger. It’s gratifying to know my aim doesn’t deteriorate under pressure.”

The slug from her sidearm had gone in under the right jaw line, ploughed directly through the centre of the brain and blown an admirably symmetrical hole in the top of her head on its way out.

“Hard to miss at that range,” I said with experimental brutality.

The calm eyes never flinched.

“I understand it can be done,” she said gravely.

Hand cleared his throat. “Would you like to tell us why you did it?”

She frowned. “Again?”

“That,” said Hand through slightly gritted teeth, “was a debriefing construct, not me.”

“Oh.”

The eyes slanted sideways and up, searching, I guessed, for a retina-wired peripheral scroll down. The virtuality had been written not to render internal hardware, except in Mandrake personnel, but she showed no surprise at a lack of response so maybe she was just remembering it the old-fashioned way.

“It was a squadron of automated armour. Spider tanks. I was trying to undermine their response parameters, but there was a viral booby trap wired into the control systems. A Rawling variant, I believe.” The mild grimace again. “There was very little time to take stock, as you can probably imagine, so I can’t be sure. In any event, there was no time to jack out; the primary baffles of the virus had already welded me in. In the time I had before it downloaded fully, I could only come up with the one option.”

“Very impressive,” said Hand.

When it was done, we went back up to the roof to clear our heads. I leaned on a parapet and looked out over the curfewed quiet of Landfall while Hand went off to find some coffee. The terraces behind me were deserted, chairs and tables scattered like some hieroglyphic message left for orbital eyes. The night had cooled off while we were below, and the breeze made me shiver. Sun Liping’s words came back to me.

Rawling variant.

It was the Rawling virus that had killed the Innenin beachhead. Had made Jimmy de Soto claw out his own eye before he died. State-of-the-art back then, cheap off-the-rack military surplus now. The only viral software Kemp’s hard-pressed forces could afford.

Times change, but market forces are forever. History unreels, the real dead stay that way.

The rest of us get to go on.

Hand came back apologetically with machine-coffee canisters. He handed me mine and leaned on the parapet at my side.

“So what do you think?” he asked after a while.

“I think it tastes like shit.”

He chuckled. “What do you think of our team?”

“They’ll do.” I sipped at the coffee and brooded on the city below. “I’m not overhappy about the ninja, but he’s got some useful skills and he seems prepared to get killed in the line of duty, which is always a big advantage in a soldier. How long to prep the clones?”

“Two days. Maybe a little less.”

“It’ll be twice that before these people are up to speed in a new sleeve. Can we do the induction in virtual?”

“I see no reason why not. The MAI can spin out hundred per cent accurate renderings for each clone from the raw data in the biolab machines. Running at three-fifty times real, we can give the whole team a full month in their new sleeves, on site in the Dangrek construct, all inside a couple of hours, real time.”

“Good,” I said, and wondered why it didn’t feel that way.

“My own reservations are with Sutjiadi. I am not convinced that a man like that can be expected to take orders well.”

I shrugged. “So give him the command.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? He’s qualified for it. He’s got the rank, and he’s had the experience. Seems to have loyalty to his men.”

Hand said nothing. I could sense his frown across the half metre of parapet that separated us.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “I had just. Assumed. You would want the command yourself.”

I saw the platoon again as the smart shrapnel barrage erupted overhead. Lightning flash, explosions, and then the fragments, skipping and hissing hungrily through the quicksilver flashing curtain of the rain. Crackling of blaster discharge in the background, like something ripping.

Screams.

What was on my face didn’t feel like a smile, but evidently it was.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’ve read my file, Hand.”

“Yes.”

“And you still thought I wanted the command. Are you fucking insane?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The coffee kept me awake.

Hand went to bed or whatever canister he crawled into when Mandrake wasn’t using him, and left me staring at the desert night. I searched the sky for Sol and found it glimmering in the east at the apex of a constellation the locals called the Thumb Home. Hand’s words drifted back through me.

…So far from earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine…

I shook it off, irritably.

It wasn’t like I’d been born there. Earth was no more home to me than Sanction IV, and if my father had ever pointed Sol out to me in between bouts of drunken violence, I had no memory of it. Any significance that particular point of light had for me, I’d got off a disc. And from here, you couldn’t even see the star that Harlan’s World orbited.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Or maybe it was just that I’d been there, to the legendary home of the human race, and now, looking up, I could imagine, a single astronomical unit out from the glimmering star, a world in spin, a city by the sea dropping away into darkness as night came on, or rolling back up and into the light, a police cruiser parked somewhere and a certain police lieutenant drinking coffee not much better than mine and maybe thinking…

That’s enough, Kovacs.

For your information, the light you’re watching arrive left fifty years before she was even born. And that sleeve you’re fantasising about is in its sixties by now, if she’s even wearing it still. Let it go.

Yeah, yeah.

I knocked back the dregs of the coffee, grimaced as it went down cold. By the look of the eastern horizon, dawn was on its way, and I had a sudden crushing desire not to be here when it arrived. I left the coffee carton standing sentinel on the parapet, and picked my way back through the scattered chairs and tables to the nearest elevator terminal.

The elevator dropped me the three floors to my suite and I made it along the gently curving corridor without meeting anyone. I was pulling the retina cup out of the door on its saliva-thin cable when the sound of footfalls in the machined quiet sent me back against the opposite wall, right hand reaching for the single interface gun I still carried from habit tucked into the back of my waistband.

Spooked.

You’re in the Mandrake Tower, Kovacs. Executive levels. Not even dust gets up here without authorisation. Get a fucking grip, will you.

“Kovacs?”

Tanya Wardani’s voice.

I swallowed and pushed myself away from the wall. Wardani rounded the curve of the corridor and stood looking at me with what seemed like an unusual proportion of uncertainty in her stance.

“I’m sorry, did I scare you?”

“No.” Reaching again for the retina cup, which had backreeled into the door when I went for the Kalashnikov.

“Have you been up all night?”

“Yes.” I applied the cup to my eye and the door folded back. “You?”

“More or less. I tried to get some sleep a couple of hours ago, but…” she shrugged. “Too keyed up. Are you all done?”

“With the recruiting?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“How are they?”

“Good enough.”

The door made an apologetic chiming sound, drawing attention to the lack of entry effected so far.

“Are you—”

“Do you—” I gestured.

“Thanks.” She moved, awkwardly, and stepped in ahead of me.

The suite lounge was walled in glass that I’d left at semi-opaque when I went out. City lights specked the smoky surface like deep-fry caught glowing in a Millsport trawler’s nets. Wardani halted in the middle of the subtly furnished living space and turned about.

“I—”

“Have a seat. The mauve ones are all chairs.”

“Thanks, I still can’t quite get used to—”

“State of the art.” I watched as she perched on the edge of one of the modules, and it tried in vain to lift and shape itself around her body. “Want a drink?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Pipe?”

“God, no.”

“So how’s the hardware?”

“It’s good.” She nodded, more to herself than anyone. “Yes. Good enough.”

“Good.”

“You think we’re nearly ready?”

“I—” I pushed away the flash-rip behind my eyes and crossed to one of the other seats, making a performance of settling into it. “We’re waiting for developments up there. You know that.”

“Yes.”

A shared quiet.

“Do you think they’ll do it?”

“Who? The Cartel?” I shook my head. “Not if they can help it. But Kemp might. Look, Tanya. It may not even happen. But whether it does or not, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s too late for that kind of intervention now. Way war works. Abolition of the individual.”

“What’s that? Some kind of Quellist epigram?”

I smiled. “Loosely paraphrased, yes. You want to know what Quell had to say about war? About all violent conflict?”

She made a restless motion. “Not really. OK, sure. Tell me. Why not. Tell me something I haven’t heard before.”

“She said wars are fought over hormones. Male hormones, largely. It’s not about winning or losing at all, it’s about hormonal discharge. She wrote a poem about it, back before she went underground. Let’s see—”

I closed my eyes and thought back to Harlan’s World. A safe house in the hills above Millsport. Stolen bioware stacked in a corner, pipes and post-op celebration wreathing the air. Idly arguing politics with Virginia Vidaura and her crew, the infamous Little Blue Bugs. Quellist quotes and poetry bantered back and forth.

“You in pain?”

I opened my eyes and shot her a reproachful glance. “Tanya, this stuff was mostly written in Stripjap. That’s a Harlan’s World trade tongue—gibberish to you. I’m trying to remember the Amanglic version.”

“Well, it looks painful. Don’t knock yourself out on my account.” I held up a hand. “Goes like this:

Male-sleeved;

Stop up your hormones

Or spend them in moans

Of other calibre

(We’ll reassure you—the load is large enough)

Blood-pumped

Pride in your prowess

Will fail you, fuck you

And everything you touch

(You’ll reassure us—the price was small enough)”

I sat back. She sniffed.

“Bit of an odd stance for a revolutionary. Didn’t she lead some kind of bloody uprising? Fight to the death against Protectorate tyranny, or something?”

“Yeah. Several kinds of bloody uprising, in fact. But there’s no evidence she actually died. She disappeared in the last battle for Millsport. They never recovered a stack.”

“I don’t really see how storming the gates of this Millsport gels with that poem.”

I shrugged. “Well, she never really changed her views on the roots of violence, even in the thick of it. Just realised it couldn’t be avoided, I guess. Changed her actions instead, to suit the terrain.”

“That’s not much of a philosophy.”

“No, it isn’t. But Quellism was never very big on dogma. About the only credo Quell ever subscribed to was Face the Facts. She wanted that on her tomb. Face the Facts. That meant dealing with them creatively, not ignoring them or trying to pretend they’re just some historical inconvenience. She always said you can’t control a war. Even when she was starting one.”

“Sounds a little defeatist to me.”

“Not at all. It’s just recognition of the danger. Facing the facts. Don’t start wars if you can possibly avoid it. Because once you do, it’s out of any sane control. No one can do anything except try to survive while it runs its hormonal course. Hold on to the rod and ride it out. Stay alive, and wait for the discharge.”

“Whatever.” She yawned and looked out of the window. “I’m not very good at waiting, Kovacs. You’d think being an archaeologue would have cured me of that, wouldn’t you.” A shaky little laugh. “That, and. The camp—”

I stood up abruptly. “Let me get you that pipe.”

“No.” She hadn’t moved, but her voice was nailed down solid. “I don’t need to forget anything, Kovacs. I need—”

She cleared her throat.

“I need you to do something for me. With me. What you did to me. Before, I mean. What you did has.” She looked down at her hands. “Had an impact I didn’t. Didn’t expect.”

“Ah.” I sat down again. “That.”

“Yes, that.” There was a flicker of anger in her tone now. “I suppose it makes sense. It’s an emotion-bending process.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yes, it is. Well, there’s one particular emotion I need bending back into place now, and I don’t really see any other way to do that than by fucking you.”

“I’m not sure that—”

“I don’t care,” she said violently. “You changed me. You fixed me.” Her voice quietened. “I suppose I should be grateful, but that isn’t how it feels. I don’t feel grateful, I feel fixed. You’ve created this. Imbalance in me, and I want that part of me back.”

“Look, Tanya, you aren’t really in any condition—”

“Oh, that.” She smiled thinly. “I appreciate I’m not exactly sexually attractive right now, except maybe—”

“Wasn’t what I meant—”

“To a few freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck. No, we’ll need to fix that. We need to go virtual for this.”

I struggled to shake off a numbing sense of unreality. “You want to do this now?”

“Yes, I do.” Another sliced-off smile. “It’s interfering with my sleep patterns, Kovacs. And right now I need my sleep.”

“Do you have somewhere in mind?”

“Yes.” It was like a children’s game of dare.

“So where is that exactly?”

“Downstairs.” She got up and looked down at me. “You know, you ask a lot of questions for a man that’s about to get laid.”

Downstairs was a floor about midway up the tower which the elevator announced as a recreational level. The doors opened onto the unpartitioned space of a fitness centre, machines bulking insect-like and menacing in the unlit gloom. Towards the back, I spotted the tilted webs of a dozen or so virtualink racks.

“We doing this out here?” I asked uncomfortably.

“No. Closed chambers at the back. Come on.”

We passed through the forest of stilled machines, lights flickering up above and amongst them, then flickering out again as we moved on. I watched the process out of a neurasthenic grotto that had been growing up around me like coral since before I came down from the roof. Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn’t quite sharp enough any more, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.

The cure for this definitely is not more virtual time.

There were nine closed chambers, modular blisters swelling out of the end wall under their respective numbers. Seven and eight were cracked open, spilling low orange light around the line of the hatch. Wardani stopped in front of seven and the door hinged outward. The orange light expanded pleasantly in the gap, tuned into soft hypnomode. No dazzle. She turned to look back at me.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Eight is slaved to this one. Just hit ‘consensual’ on the menu pad.”

And she disappeared into the warm orange glow.

Inside module eight, someone had seen fit to cover the walls and roofing with empathist psychogram art, which in the hypnomode lighting seemed little more than a random set of fishtail swirls and spots. Then again, that’s what most empathist stuff looks like to me in any light. The air was just the right side of warm and beside the automould couch there was a complicated spiral of metal to hang clothes.

I stripped off and settled on the automould, pulled down the headgear and swiped the flashing consensual diamond as the displays came online. I just remembered to knock out the physical feedback baffle option before the system kicked in.

The orange light appeared to thicken, taking on a foggy substance through which the psychogram swirls and dots swam like complex equations or maybe some kind of pond life. I had a moment to wonder if the artist had intended either of those comparisons—empathists are a weird lot—and then the orange was fading and shredding away like steam, and I stood in an immense tunnel of black vented metal panels, lit only by lines of flashing red diodes that receded to infinity in both directions.

In front of me, more of the orange fog boiled up out of a vent and shredded into a recognisably female form. I watched fascinated as Tanya Wardani began to emerge from the general outline, made at first entirely of flickering orange smoke, then seemingly veiled in it from head to foot, then clad only in patches, and then, as these tore away, clad in nothing at all.

Glancing down at myself, I saw I was similarly naked.

“Welcome to the loading deck.”

Looking up again, my first thought was that she had already gone to work on herself. Most constructs load on self-images held in the memory, with subroutines to beat anything too delusional—you end up looking pretty much the way you do in reality, less a couple of kilos and maybe plus a centimetre or two. The version of Tanya Wardani I was looking at didn’t have those kind of discrepancies—it was more a general sheen of health that she didn’t yet have back in the real world, or perhaps just the lack of a similar, more grimy sheen of unhealth. The eyes were less sunken, the cheek and collar bones less pronounced. Under the slightly pouched breasts, the ribs were there, but fleshed far past what I’d imagined below her draped clothing.

“They’re not big on mirrors in the camp,” she said, maybe reading something in my expression. “Except for interrogation. And after a while you try not to see yourself in windows walking past. I probably still look a lot worse than I think I do. Especially after that instant fix you loaded into me.”

I couldn’t think of anything even remotely appropriate to say.

“You on the other hand…” She stepped forward and, reaching out low, caught me by the prick. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.”

I was hard almost instantly.

Maybe it was something written into the protocols of the system, maybe just too long without the release. Or maybe there was some unclean fascination in anticipating the use of this body with its lightly accented marks of privation. Enough to hint artfully at abuse, not enough to repel. Freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck? No telling how a combat sleeve might be wired at this level. Or any male sleeve, come to that. Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It’s a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you’ll drag up once you start excavating.

“That’s good,” she breathed, abruptly close to my ear. She had not let go. “But I don’t rate this much. You’ve not been looking after yourself, soldier.”

Her other hand spread wide and scraped up my belly from the roots of my prick to the arc of my ribcage. Like a carpenter’s sanding glove, planing back the layering of flab that had begun to thicken over my sleeve’s tank-grown abdominal musculature. I glanced down, and saw with a slight visceral shock that some of the flab really had started to plane off, fading out with the motion of her flattened palm. It left a warm feeling threaded through the muscle beneath, like whisky going down.

Sy-system magic, I managed through the spasm as she tugged hard at me with the gripping hand and repeated the upward smoothing gesture with the other.

I lifted my own hands towards her, and she skipped back.

“Uh-uh.” She took another step away. “I’m not ready yet. Look at me.”

She lifted both hands and cupped her breasts. Pushed upward with the heels of her palms, then let them fall back, fuller, larger. The nipples—had one of them been broken before?—swollen dark and conical like chocolate sheathing on the copper skin.

“Like that?” she asked.

“Very much.”

She repeated the open-handed grasping motion, topping it with a circular massaging action. When she let go this time, her breasts were well on their way to the dimensions of one of Djoko Roespinoedji’s gravity-defying concubines. She reached back and did something similar to her buttocks, turning to show me the cartoon rounding she’d given them. She bent forward and pulled the cheeks apart.

“Lick me,” she said, with sudden urgency.

I went down on one knee and pressed my face into the crease, spearing forward with my tongue, working at the tight whorl of closed sphincter. I wrapped an arm around one long thigh to steady myself and with the other hand I reached up and found her already wet. The ball of my thumb sank into her from the front as my tongue worked deeper from the rear, both rubbing soft synchronised circles amid her insides. She grunted, somewhere at the base of her throat, and we

Shifted

Into liquid blue. The floor was gone, and most of the gravity with it. I thrashed and lost my thumbhold. Wardani twisted languidly around and fastened to me like belaweed around a rock. The fluid was not water; it had left our skins slick against each other, and I could breath it as well as if it were tropical air. I gasped my lungs full of it as Wardani slithered down, biting at my chest and stomach, and finally laid hands and mouth on my hard-on.

I didn’t last long. Floating in the infinite blue while Tanya Wardani’s newly pneumatic breasts pressed against my thighs and her nipples traced up and down on my oiled skin and her mouth sucked and her curled fingers pumped, I had just enough time to notice a light source above us before my neck muscles started to tauten, cranking my head back, and the twitching messages along my nerves gathered together for a final climactic rush.

There was a scratch replay vibrato effect built into the construct. My orgasm went on for over thirty seconds.

As it tailed off, Tanya Wardani floated up past me, hair spread around her face, threads of semen blown out amidst bubbles from the corners of her grin. I struck out and grabbed one passing thigh, dragged her back into range.

She flexed in the water analogue as my tongue sank into her, and more bubbles ran out of her mouth. I caught the reverberation of her moan through the fluid like the sympathetic vibration of jet engines in the pit of my stomach, and felt myself stiffening in response. I pressed my tongue down harder, forgetting to breathe and then discovering I didn’t actually need to for a long time. Wardani’s writhing grew more urgent and she crooked her legs around my back to anchor herself in place. I cupped her buttocks and squeezed, pushing my face into the folds of her cunt, then slid my thumb back inside her and recommenced the soft circular motion in counterpoint to the spiralling of my tongue. She gripped my head in both hands and crushed my face against her. Her writhings became thrashings, her moans a sustained shout that filled my ears like the sound of surf overhead. I sucked. She stiffened, and screamed, and then shuddered for minutes.

We drifted to the surface together, An astronomically unlikely red giant sun was sinking at the horizon, bathing the suddenly normalised water around us in stained-glass light. Two moons sat high in the eastern sky and behind us waves broke on a white sand beach fringed by palms.

“Did you. Write this?” I asked, treading water and nodding at the view.

“Hardly.” She wiped water out of her eyes and slicked back her hair with both, hands. “It’s off the rack. I checked out what they had this afternoon. Why, you like it?”

“So far. But I have a feeling that sun is an astronomical impossibility.”

“Yeah, well, breathing underwater’s not overly realistic either.”

“I didn’t get to breathe.” I held my hands above the water in claws, miming the grip she’d had on my head, and pulled a suffocated face. “This bring back any memories?”

To my amazement, she flushed scarlet. Then she laughed, splashed water in my face and struck out for the shore. I trod water for a moment, laughing too, and then went after her.

The sand was warm, powder fine and system-magically unwilling to stick to wet flesh. Behind the beach, coconuts fell sporadically from the palms and, unless collected, broke down into fragments which were carried away by tiny jewel-coloured crabs.

We fucked again at the water’s edge, Tanya Wardani seated astride my cock, cartoon ass bedded soft and warm on my crossed legs. I buried my face in her breasts, settled hands at her hips and lifted her gently up and down until the shuddering started in her again, caught me like a contagious fever and ran through us both. The scratch replay subroutine had a resonance system built in that cycled the orgasm back and forth between us like an oscillating signal, swamping and ebbing for what felt like forever.

It was love. Perfect passion compatibility, trapped, distilled and amped up almost beyond bearing.

“You knock out the baffles?” she asked me, a little breathlessly, after.

“Of course. You think I want to go through all this and still come out swilling full of semen and sex hormones?”

“Go through?” She lifted her head from the sand, outraged.

I grinned back. “Sure. This is for your benefit, Tanya. I wouldn’t be here other—Hoy, no throwing sand.”

“Fucking—”

“Look—”

I fended off the fistful of sand with one arm and pushed her into the surf. She went over backwards, laughing. I stood up in a ludicrous Micky Nozawa fighting stance, while she picked herself up. Something out of Siren Fist Demons.

“Don’t try to lay your profane hands on me, woman.”

“Looks to me like you want to have hands laid on you,” she said, shaking back her hair and pointing.

It was true. The sight of the system magic-enhanced body, beaded with water, had the signals flickering through my nerve endings again, and my glans was already filling up with blood like a ripening plum in time-lapse fast-forward sequence.

I gave up the guard, and glanced around the construct. “You know, off the rack or not, this is some good shit, Tanya.”

“Last year’s CyberSex Down seal of approval, apparently.” She shrugged. “I took a chance. You want to try the water again? Or, apparently there’s this waterfall thing back through the trees.”

“Sounds good to me.”

On the way past the front line of palms with their huge phallic trunks lifting like dinosaur necks off the sand, I scooped up a newly fallen coconut. The crabs scattered with comic speed, scuttling for burrows in the sand from which they poked cautious eyestalks. I turned the coconut over in my hands. It had landed with a small chunk already torn out of the green shell, exposing soft, rubbery flesh beneath. Nice touch. I punctured the inner membrane with my thumb and tipped it back like a gourd. The milk inside was improbably chilled.

Another nice touch.

The forest floor beyond was conveniently clear of sharp debris and insects. Water poured and splashed somewhere with attention-grabbing clarity. An obvious path led through the palm trunks towards the sound. We walked, hand in hand, beneath rainforest foliage filled with brightly-coloured birds and small monkeys making suspiciously harmonic noises.

The waterfall was a two-tier affair, pouring down in a long plume into a wide basin, then tumbling through rocks and rapids to another smaller pool where the drop was less. I arrived slightly ahead of her and stood on wet rocks at the edge of the second pool, arms akimbo, looking down. I repressed a grin. The moment was cleared for her to push me in, trembling with the potential.

Nothing.

I turned to look at her, and saw she was trembling slightly.

“Hoy, Tanya.” I took her face between my hands. “Are you OK? What’s the matter?”

But I knew what the motherfucking matter was.

Because Envoy techniques or not, healing is a complex, creeping process, and it’ll glitch on you as soon as your back’s turned.

The motherfucking camp.

The low-key arousal fled, leaching out of my system like saliva from a mouthful of lemon. The fury sheeted up through me.

The motherfucking war.

If I’d had Isaac Carrera and Joshua Kemp there, in the middle of all that edenic beauty, I’d have torn their entrails out with my bare hands, knotted them together and kicked them into the pool to drown.

Can’t drown in this water, sneered the part of me that would never shut down, the smug Envoy control. You can breathe in this water.

Maybe men like Kemp and Carrera couldn’t.

Yeah, right.

So instead, I caught Tanya Wardani around the waist, and crushed her against me, and jumped for us both.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I came out of it with an alkaline smell in my nostrils and my belly sticky with fresh semen. My balls ached as if they’d been kicked. Over my head, the display had cleared to standby. A time-check pulsed in one corner. I’d been under less than two minutes, real time.

I sat up groggily.

“Fuck. Me.” I cleared my throat, and looked around. Fresh self-moistening towelling hung from a roll behind the automould, presumably with just this in mind. I tore off a handful and wiped myself down, still trying to blink the virtuality out of my eyes.

We’d fucked in the waterfall pool, languid underwater once Wardani’s trembling had passed.

We’d fucked again on the beach.

We’d fucked back up on the loading deck, a last-chance-grabbed-at-leaving sort of thing.

I tore off more towel, wiped my face and rubbed at my eyes. I dressed slowly, stowed the smart gun, wincing as it prodded down from my waistband into my tender groin. I found a mirror on the wall of the chamber and peered into it, trying to sort out what had happened to me in there.

Envoy psychoglue.

I’d used it on Wardani without really thinking about it, and now she was up and walking around. That was what I’d wanted. The dependency whiplash was an almost inevitable side-effect, but so what? It was the kind of thing that didn’t much matter in the usual Envoy run of things—as likely as not you were in combat with other things to worry about, often you’d moved on by the time it became a problem the subject had to deal with. What didn’t generally happen was the kind of restorative purging Wardani had prescribed for herself and then gone after.

I couldn’t predict how that would work.

I’d never known it to happen before. Never even seen it before.

I couldn’t work out what she’d made me feel in turn.

And I wasn’t learning anything new looking at myself in the mirror.

I built a shrug and a grin, and walked out of the chamber into the pre-dawn gloom among the stilled machines. Wardani was waiting outside, by one of the open-rig webs and

Not alone.

The thought jarred through my soggy nervous system, painfully sluggish, and then the unmistakeable spike-and-ring configuration at the projection end of a Sunjet was pushed against the back of my neck.

“You want to avoid any sudden moves, chum.” It was a strange accent, an equatorial twang to it even through the voiceprint distorter. “Or you and your girlfriend here are going to be wearing no heads.”

A professional hand snaked round my waist, plucked the Kalashnikov from its resting place and tossed it away across the room. I heard the muffled clunk as it hit the carpeted floor and slid.

Try to pinpoint it.

Equatorial accent.

Kempists.

I looked over at Wardani, her oddly limp-hanging arms, and the figure who held a smaller hand blaster to her nape. He was dressed in the form-fitting black of a stealth assault suit and masked with clear plastic that moved in random waves over his face, distorting the features continually, except for two little watchful blue-tinted windows over the eyes.

There was a pack on his back that had to carry whatever intrusion hardware they’d used to get in here. Had to be a biosigns imaging set, counterfeed code sampler and securisys sandbagger in there, minimum.

High fucking tech.

“You guys are so dead,” I said, trying for amused calm.

“Extra funny, chum.” The one who’d taken me tugged at my arm and pulled me around so I was looking down the ramping chute of the Sunjet. Same dress code, same running plastic mask. Same black pack. Two more clone-identical forms bulked behind him, watching opposite ends of the room. Their Sunjets were cradled low, deceptively casual. My enthusiasm for the odds collapsed like a set of unplugged LED displays.

Play for time.

“Who sent you guys?”

“See,” said the spokesman, voice squelching in and out of focus. “It’s rigged this way. Her we want, you’re just carbon walking. Limit that mouth, maybe we lift you too, just for tidiness. Keep gritting me, I’ll make a mess just to see your Envoy grey cells fly. Am I coming through?”

I nodded, desperately trying to mop up the post-coital languor that had drenched my system. Shifting my stance slightly…

Aligning from memory…

“Good, then let’s have your arms.” He dropped his left hand to his belt and produced a contact stunner. The aim of the Sunjet never wavered in the right-hand grip. The mask flexed in an approximation of a smile. “One at a time, of course.”

I raised my left arm and held it out to him. Flexed my right hand behind me, riding out the sense of impotent fury, so the palm rippled.

The little grey device came down on my wrist, charged light winking. He had to shift the Sunjet, of course, or the dead weight of my arm was going to come down on it like a club when the stunner fired…

Now. So low even the neurachem barely picked it out. A thin whine through the conditioned air.

The stunner fired.

Painless. Cold. A localised version of what it felt like to get shot with a beam stunner. The arm flopped like a dead fish, narrowly missing the Sunjet despite its new alignment. He twitched slightly aside, but it was a relaxed move. The mask grinned.

“That’s good. Now the other one.”

I smiled and shot him—

Grav microtech—a weapons engineering breakthrough from the house of Kalashnikov.

—from the hip. Three times across the chest, hoping to drill clean through whatever armour he was wearing and into the backpack. Blood—

Across short distances, the Kalashnikov AKS91 interface gun will lift and fly direct to an implanted bioalloy home plate.

—drenched the stealth suit, tickled my face with backblown spray. He staggered, Sunjet wagging like an admonishing finger. His colleagues—

Almost silent, the generator delivers total capacity in a ten-second burst.

—hadn’t worked it out yet. I fired high at the two behind him, probably hit one of them somewhere. They rolled away, grabbing cover. Return fire crackled around me, nowhere close.

I came around, dragging the numbed arm like a shoulder bag, looking for Wardani and her captor.

“Fucking don’t, man, I’ll—”

And shot through the writhing plastic of the mask.

The slug punched him back a clean three metres, into the spidery arms of a climbing machine, where he hung, slumped and used up.

Wardani dropped to the ground, bonelessly. I threw myself down, chased by fresh Sunjet fire. We landed nose to nose.

“You OK?” I hissed.

She nodded, cheek pressed flat to the floor, shoulders twitching as she tried to move her stunned arms.

“Good. Stay there.” I flailed my own numbed limb around and searched the machine jungle for the two remaining Kempists.

No sign. Could be fucking anywhere. Waiting for a clear shot.

Fuck this.

I lined up on the crumpled form of the squad leader, on the backpack. Two shots blew it apart, fragments of hardware jumping out of the exit holes in the fabric.

Mandrake security woke up.

Lights seared. Sirens shrieked from the roof, and an insectile storm of nanocopters issued from vents on the walls. They swooped over us, blinked glass bead eyes and passed us by. A few metres over, a flight of them rained laser fire down amidst the machines.

Screams.

An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.

Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.

The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.

Silence.

Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her, but could not get upright. No upper body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.

“Stay there. I’ll be back.”

I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.

The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiralled up.

“Oh, shit.”

I ran back to the one I’d shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine’s struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I’d put in the centre of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.

“Fuck.”

“Kovacs.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.

I sighed. “Here we go.”

They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.

“Remain still! Raise your hands!”

I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.

“I’m not pissing about here, folks!”

“We’re injured,” I called back. “Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout failsafes. It’s all over. Go wake Hand up.”

Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal chord with a metal stylus.

“Molecular acid canister,” he said thoughtfully. “Last year’s Shorn Biotech. I didn’t realise the Kempists had these yet.”

“They’ve got everything you’ve got, Hand. They’ve just got a lot less of it, that’s all. Read your Brankovitch. ‘Trickledown in War-based Markets’.”

“Yes, thank you, Kovacs.” Hand rubbed at his eyes. “I already have a doctorate in Conflict Investment. I don’t really need the gifted amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.”

I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.

“We were fucking,” she said.

Hand blinked.

“Oh,” he said. “Already.”

“What’s that supposed t—”

“Kovacs, please. You’re giving me a headache.” He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad who was hovering nearby. “OK, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c221mh, central clearing’ll let you have the codes.”

We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket, and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.

“Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,” he said. “Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.”

Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.

“Someone with wires to the inside too,” I added sombrely. “Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there’s no way they got in here without help. You’ve got leakage.”

“Yes, so it would appear.”

“Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar night before last?”

Wardani looked at me, alarmed.

“Someone followed us?”

I gestured at Hand. “So he says.”

“Hand?”

“Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.” He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. “It was Deng, I think.”

“Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?”

“Deng had a clone on ice,” he snapped back. “That’s standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counselling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.”

“Was he? Why don’t you call him?”

I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.

Just killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.

Hand had his audio phone open.

“Wake up Deng Zhao Jun please.” He waited. “I see. Well, try that then.”

I shook my head.

“That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.”

Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.

“Hand, I practically told him to do it.” I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. “Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.”

“I did not assign Deng, goddamn you Kovacs.” He was hanging onto his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. “And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes this is Hand.”

He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.

“Deng left the tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.”

“Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?”

“Kovacs.” The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. “I don’t want to hear it. Alright? I don’t. Want to hear it.”

I shrugged.

“No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.” Hand breathed out, compressed.

“I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.” He turned on his heel. “You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.”

I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.

Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.

“Oh.” He turned to face us. “By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred per cent casualties.”

I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.

Hand stood there and watched it happen.

“Thought you’d both like to know that,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dangrek.

The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.

At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.

“Proud of yourself, Kovacs?”

Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from further up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.

I went after her.

“You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,” I told her when I caught up. “And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.”

“Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.”

It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it non-stop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom, cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.

The MAI had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating grey fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.

“Sutjiadi, get your team deployed.”

It was Hand’s voice, drumming through the induction rig speaker. A loose exchange of military shorthand followed and in irritation I yanked the speaker away from its resting place behind my ear. I ignored the footfalls of someone tramping up the slope behind us and focused on the locked posture of Tanya Wardani’s head and neck.

“I guess it was quick for them,” she said, still staring out at the headland.

“Like the song says. Nothing faster.”

“Mistress Wardani.” It was Ole Hansen, some echo of the arc-light intensity from his original blue eyes somehow burning through the wide-set dark gaze of his new sleeve. “We’ll need to see the demolition site.”

She choked back something that might have been a laugh, and didn’t say the obvious thing.

“Sure,” she said instead. “Follow me.”

I watched the two of them pick their way down the other side of the slope towards the beach.

“Hoy! Envoy guy!”

I turned unwillingly, and spotted Yvette Cruickshank navigating her Maori sleeve uncertainly up the slope towards me, Sunjet slung flat across her chest and a set of ranging lenses pushed up on her head. I waited for her to reach me, which she did without tripping in the long grass more than a couple of times.

“How’s the new sleeve?” I called as she stumbled for the second time.

“It’s—” She shook her head, closed the gap and started again, voice lowered back to normal, “ ‘S a fraction strange, know what I mean?”

I nodded. My first re-sleeve was more than thirty subjective years in my past, objectively close to two centuries ago, but you don’t forget. The initial re-entry shock never really goes away.

“Bit fucking pallid, too.” She pinched up the skin on the back of her hand and sniffed. “How come I couldn’t get some fine black cover like yours?”

“I didn’t get killed,” I reminded her. “Besides, once the radiation starts to bite, you’re going to be glad. What you’re wearing there needs about half the dosage I’ll be taking to stay operational.”

She scowled. “Still going to get us all in the end, though, isn’t it.”

“It’s only a sleeve, Cruickshank.”

“That’s right, just give me some of that Envoy cool.” She barked a laugh and upended her Sunjet, gripping the short, thick barrel disconcertingly in one slim hand. Squinting up from the discharge channel and directly at me, she asked, “Think you could go for a white-girl sleeve like this then?”

I considered. The Maori combat sleeves were long on limb and broad in the chest and shoulders. A lot of them, like this one, were pale-skinned, and being fresh out of the clone tanks accentuated the effect, but faces ran to high cheekbones, wide spaced eyes and flaring lips and noses. White-girl sleeve seemed a little harsh. And even inside the shapeless battlefield chameleochrome coveralls…

“You going to look like that,” Cruickshank remarked, “you’d better be buying something.”

“Sorry. Just giving the question my full consideration.”

“Yeah. Skip it. I wasn’t that worried. You were operational around here, weren’t you?”

“A couple of months back.”

“So what was it like?”

I shrugged. “People shooting at you. Air full of pieces of fast-moving metal looking for a home. Pretty standard stuff. Why?”

“I heard the Wedge got a pasting. That true?”

“It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.”

“So how come Kemp suddenly decides, from a position of strength, to cut and nuke?”

“Cruickshank.” I started and then stopped, unable to think of a way to get through the armour plate of youth she was wearing. She was twenty-two, and like all twenty-two year olds she thought she was the immortal focal point of this universe. Sure she’d been killed, but so far all that had done was prove the immortal part. It would not have occurred to her that there might be a world view in which what she saw was not only marginal but almost wholly irrelevant.

She was waiting for an answer.

“Look,” I said finally. “No one told me what we were fighting for up here, and from what we got out of the prisoners we interrogated, I’d say they didn’t know either. I gave up expecting this war to make sense a while ago, and I’d advise you to do the same if you plan on surviving much more of it.”

She raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that she hadn’t quite got nailed in her new sleeve.

“So you don’t know, then.”

“No.”

“Cruickshank!” Even with my own induction rig unhooked, I heard the tinny crash of Markus Sutjiadi’s voice over the comlink. “You want to get down here and work for a living like the rest of us?”

“Coming, cap.” She pulled a mouth-down face in my direction and started back down the slope. A couple of steps down, she stopped and turned back.

“Hey, Envoy guy.”

“Yeah?”

“That stuff about the Wedge taking a pasting? Wasn’t a crit, OK. Just what I heard.”

I felt myself grinning at the carefully deployed sensitivity.

“Forget it, Cruickshank. Couldn’t give a shit. I’m more bent out of shape you didn’t like me drooling on you.”

“Oh.” She grinned back. “Well, I guess I did ask.” Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she crossed her eyes for effect. “What about I get back to you on that one?”

“Do that.”

The induction rig buzzed against my neck. I stuck it back in place and hooked up the mike.

“Yeah, Sutjiadi?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, sir,” The irony dripped off the last word, “would you mind leaving my soldiers alone while they deploy?”

“Yeah, sorry. Won’t happen again.”

“Good.”

I was about to disconnect when Tanya Wardani’s voice came across the net in soft expletives.

“Who’s that?” snapped Sutjiadi. “Sun?”

“I don’t fucking believe this.”

“It’s Mistress Wardani, sir.” Ole Hansen came in, laconically calm, over the muttered curses from the archaeologue. “I think you’d better all get down here and take a look at this.”

I raced Hand to the beach and lost by a couple of metres. Cigarettes and damaged lungs don’t count in a virtuality, so it must have been concern for Mandrake’s investment that drove him. Very commendable. Still not attuned to their new sleeves, the rest of the party fell behind us. We reached Wardani alone.

We found her in much the same position she’d taken up facing the rockfall last time we’d been in the construct. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at.

“Where’s Hansen?” I asked stupidly.

“He went in,” she said, waving a hand forward. “For what it’s worth.”

Then I saw it. The pale bite-marks of recent blasting, gathered around a two-metre fissure opened in the fall, and a path winding out of sight beyond.

“Kovacs?” There was a brittle lightness to the query in Hand’s tone.

“I see it. When did you update the construct?”

Hand stalked closer to examine the blasting marks. “Today.”

Tanya Wardani nodded to herself. “High-orbit satellite geoscan, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well.” The archaeologue turned away and reached in her coat pocket for cigarettes. “We aren’t going to find anything out here then.”

“Hansen!” Hand cupped his hands and shouted into the fissure, the induction rig he was wearing apparently forgotten.

“I hear you.” The demolition expert’s voice came thrumming back on the rig, detached and edged with a smirk. “There’s nothing back here.”

“Of course there isn’t,” commented Wardani, to nobody in particular.

“…some kind of circular clearing, about twenty metres across, but the rocks look strange. Kind of fused.”

“That’s improvisation,” said Hand impatiently into the rig mike. “The MAI’s guessing at what’s in there.”

“Ask him if there’s anything in the middle,” said Wardani, kindling her cigarette against the breeze off the sea.

Hand relayed the query. The answer crackled back over the set.

“Yeah, some kind of central boulder, maybe a stalagmite.”

Wardani nodded. “That’s your gate,” she said. “Probably old echo-sounding data the MAI reeled in from some flyby area recon a while ago. It’s trying to map the data with what it can see from the orbital view, and since it’s got no reason to believe there’s anything in there but rocks—”

“Someone’s been here,” said Hand, jaw set.

“Well yes.” Wardani blew out smoke and pointed. “Oh, and there’s that.”

Anchored in the shallows a few hundred metres along the beach, a small, battered-looking trawler wagged back and forth in a longshore current. Her nets spilled over the side like something escaping.

The sky whited out.

It wasn’t quite as rough a ride as the ID&A set had been, but still, the abrupt return to reality impacted on my system like a bath of ice, chilling extremities and sending a shiver deep through the centre of my guts. My eyes snapped open on the expensive empathist psychogram art.

“Oh, nice,” I grumbled, sitting up in the soft lighting and groping around for the ‘trodes.

The chamber door hinged outward on a subdued hum. Hand stood in the doorway, clothing still fully not closed up, limned from behind by the brightness of normal lights. I squinted at him.

“Was that really necessary?”

“Get your shirt on, Kovacs.” He was closing his own at the neck as he spoke. “We’ve got things to do. I want to be on the peninsula by this evening.”

“Aren’t you overreacting a li—”

He was already turning away.

“Hand, the recruits aren’t used to those sleeves yet. Not by a long way.”

“I left them in there.” He flung the words back over his shoulder. “They can have another ten minutes—that’s two days virtual time. Then we download them for real and leave. If someone’s up at Dangrek ahead of us, they’re going to be very sorry.”

“If they were there when Sauberville went down,” I shouted after him, suddenly furious. “They’re probably already very sorry. Along with everyone else.”

I heard his footsteps, receding up the corridor. Mandrake Man, shirt closed up, suit settling onto squared shoulders, moving forward. Enabled. About Mandrake’s heavy-duty business, while I sat bare-chested in a puddle of my own unfocused rage.