Broken Angels

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There is no subtle way to deploy an IP vessel across half a planet. So we didn’t try.

Mandrake booked us a priority launch and landing parabola with the Cartel’s suborbital traffic arm, and we flew out to an anonymous landing field on the outskirts of Landfall just as the heat was leaching out of the afternoon. There was a shiny new Lockheed Mitoma IP assault ship dug into the concrete, looking like nothing so much as a smoked glass scorpion someone had ripped the fighting claws off. Ameli Vongsavath grunted in approval when she saw it.

“Omega series,” she said to me, mainly because I happened to be standing next to her when we climbed out of the cruiser. She was fixing her hair reflexively as she spoke, twisting the thick black strands up and clear of the flight symbiote sockets at her nape, pegging the loosely gathered bun in place with static clips. “You could fly that baby right down Incorporation Boulevard and not even scorch the trees. Put plasma torpedoes through the front door of the Senate House, stand on your tail and be in orbit before they blew.”

“For example,” I said dryly. “Of course, with those mission objectives, you’d be a Kempist, which means you’d be flying some beaten-up piece of shit like a Mowai Ten. Right, Schneider?”

Schneider grinned. “Yeah, doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“What doesn’t bear thinking about?” Yvette Cruickshank wanted to know. “Being a Kempist?”

“No, flying a Mowai,” Schneider told her, eyes flickering up and down the frame of her Maori combat sleeve. “Being a Kempist’s not so bad. Well, apart from all the pledge singing.”

Cruickshank blinked. “You were really a Kempist?”

“He’s joking,” I said, with a warning glance at Schneider. There was no political officer along this time, but Jiang Jianping at least seemed to have strong feelings about Kemp, and there was no telling how many other members of the team might share them. Stirring up potential animosities just to impress well-shaped women didn’t strike me as all that smart.

Then again, Schneider hadn’t had his hormones wrung out in virtual that morning, so maybe I was just being unduly balanced about the whole thing.

One of the Lock Mit’s loading hatches hinged up. A moment later Hand appeared in the entrance in neatly pressed combat chameleochrome, now smoky grey against the prevalent hue of the assault ship. The change from his usual corporate attire was so complete it jarred, for all that everyone else was similarly dressed.

“Welcome to the fucking cruise,” muttered Hansen.

We cleared for dust-off five minutes before Mandrake’s authorised launch envelope opened. Ameli Vongsavath put the flight plan to bed in the Lock Mit’s datacore, powered up the systems and then to all appearances went to sleep. Jacked in at nape and cheekbone, eyes shuttered down, she lay back in her borrowed Maori flesh like the cryocapped princess in some obscure Settlement Years fairytale. She’d scored perhaps the darkest, slimmest built of the sleeves, and the data cables stood out against her skin like pale worms.

Sidelined in the co-pilot’s seat, Schneider cast longing glances at the helm.

“You’ll get your chance,” I told him.

“Yeah, when?”

“When you’re a millionaire on Latimer.”

He shot me a resentful glance and put one booted foot up on the console in front of him.

“Ha fucking ha.”

Below her closed eyes, Ameli Vongsavath’s mouth quirked. It must have sounded like an elaborate way of saying not in a million years. None of the Dangrek crew knew about the deal with Mandrake. Hand had introduced us as consultants, and left it at that.

“You think it’ll go through the gate?” I asked Schneider, trying to extract him from his sulk.

He didn’t look up at me. “How the hell would I know?”

“Just w—”

“Gentlemen,” Ameli Vongsavath had still not opened her eyes. “Do you think I could have a little pre-swim quiet in here please?”

“Yeah, shut up Kovacs,” said Schneider maliciously. “Why don’t you get back with the passengers?”

Back in the main cabin, the seats on either side of Wardani were taken by Hand and Sun Liping, so I crossed to the opposing side and dropped into the space next to Luc Deprez. He gave me a curious glance and then went back to examining his new hands.

“Like it?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “It has a certain splendour. But I am not used to being so bulky, you know.”

“You’ll settle into it. Sleeping helps.”

The curious look again. “You know this for certain then. What kind of consultant are you exactly?”

“Ex-Envoy.”

“Really?” He shifted in the seat. “That’s a surprise. You will have to tell me about this.”

I caught echoes of his movement from other seats, where I’d been overheard. Instant notoriety. Just like being back in the Wedge.

“Long story. And not very interesting.”

“We are now one minute from launch,” Ameli Vongsavath’s voice came through the intercom, sardonic, “I’d like to take this opportunity to officially welcome you aboard the fast assault launch Nagini and to warn you that if you are not now secured to a seat, I cannot guarantee your physical integrity for the next fifteen minutes.”

There was a scrabble of activity along the two lines of seats. Grins broke out among those who had already webbed in.

“I think she exaggerates,” remarked Deprez, smoothing the webbing bond tabs unhurriedly into unity on the harness’s chest plate. “These vessels have good compensators.”

“Well, you never know. Might catch some orbital fire on the way through.”

“That’s right, Kovacs.” Hansen grinned across at me. “Look on the positive side.”

“Just thinking ahead.”

“Are you afraid?” asked Jiang suddenly.

“Regularly. You?”

“Fear is an inconvenience. You must learn to suppress it. That is what it is to be a committed soldier. To abandon fear.”

“No, Jiang,” said Sun Liping gravely. “That is what it is to be dead.”

The assault ship tilted suddenly, and weight smashed down on my guts and chest. Blood-drained limbs. Crushed-out breath.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Ole Hansen through his teeth.

It slacked off, presumably when we got orbital and some of the power Ameli Vongsavath had rammed into the lifters was allowed back into the onboard grav system. I rolled my head sideways to look at Deprez.

“Exaggerates, huh?”

He spotted blood from his bitten tongue onto his knuckle and looked at it critically. “I would call that exaggeration, yes.”

“Orbital status attained,” Vongsavath’s voice confirmed. “We have approximately six minutes of safe transit under the Landfall High Orbit Geosynch Umbrella. After that we’re exposed, and I’ll be throwing some evasive curves, so keep those tongues tucked up safe.”

Deprez nodded glumly and held up his blood-spotted knuckle. Laughter down the gangway.

“Hey, Hand,” said Yvette Cruickshank. “How come the Cartel doesn’t just put up five, six of those HOGs, wide-spaced, and finish this war?”

Further down the opposite row, Markus Sutjiadi smiled very slightly, but said nothing. His eyes flickered towards Ole Hansen.

“Hey, Cruickshank.” The demolitions expert could have been speaking on Sutjiadi’s cue. His tone was withering. “Can you even spell marauder? You got any idea what kind of target a HOG makes from shallow space?”

“Yeah.” Cruickshank came back stubborn. “But most of Kemp’s marauders are on the ground now, and with the geosynchs in place…”

“Try telling that to the inhabitants of Sauberville,” Wardani told her, and the comment dragged a comet tail of quiet across the discussion. Glances shuttled back and forth up the gangway like slug-thrower shells chambering.

“That attack was ground launched, Mistress Wardani,” said Jiang finally.

“Was it?”

Hand cleared his throat. “In point of fact, the Cartel are not entirely sure how many of Kemp’s missile drones are still deployed off-planet—”

“No shit,” grunted Hansen.

“—but to attempt high-orbit placement of any substantial platform at this stage would not be sufficiently—”

“Profitable?” asked Wardani.

Hand gave her an unpleasant smile. “Low risk.”

“We’re about to leave the Landfall HOG umbrella,” said Ameli Vongsavath over the intercom, tour-guide calm. “Expect some kinks.”

I felt a subtle increase in pressure at my temples as power diverted from the onboard compensators. Vongsavath getting ready for aerobatics around the curve of the world and down through re-entry. With the HOG setting behind us, there would be no more paternal corporate presence to cushion our fall back into the war zone. From here on in, we were out to play on our own.

They exploit, and deal, and shift ground constantly, but for all that you can get used to them. You can get used to their gleaming company towers and their nanocopter security, their cartels and their HOGs, their stretched-over-centuries unhuman patience and their assumed inheritance of godfather status for the human race. You can get so you’re grateful for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief of whatever little flange of existence they afford you on the corporate platform.

You can get so it seems eminently preferable to a cold gut-swooping drop into the human chaos waiting below.

You can get so you’re grateful.

Got to watch out for that.

“Over the rim,” said Ameli Vongsavath from the cockpit.

We dropped.

With the onboard comp running at combat minimum, it felt like the start of a grav jump, before the harness kicks in. My guts lifted to the base of my ribcage and the back of my eyeballs tickled. The neurachem fizzled sullenly to unwanted life and the bioalloy plates in my hands shivered. Vongsavath must have nailed us to the floor of Mandrake’s landing envelope and piled on everything the main drives would give her, hoping to beat any distant early-warned Kempist anti-incursion systems that might have decoded the flight path from Cartel traffic transmissions.

It seemed to work.

We came down in the sea about two kilometres off the Dangrek coast, Vongsavath using the water to crash cool re-entry surfaces in approved military fashion. In some places, environmental pressure groups have got violent over this kind of contamination, but somehow I doubted anyone on Sanction IV would be up for it. War has a soothing, simplifying effect on politics that must hit the politicians like a betathanatine rush. You don’t have to balance the issues any more, and you can justify anything. Fight and win, and bring the victory home. Everything else whites out, like the sky over Sauberville.

“Surface status attained,” intoned Vongsavath. “Preliminary sweeps show no traffic. I’m going for the beach on secondaries, but I’d like you to stay in your seats until advised otherwise. Commander Hand, we have a needlecast squirt from Isaac Carrera you might like to have a look at.”

Hand traded glances with me. He reached back and touched the seat mike.

“Run it on the discreet loop. Mine, Kovacs, Sutjiadi.”

“Understood.”

I pulled down the headset and settled the discreet reception mask over my face. Carrera came online behind the shrill warble of unravelling scrambler codes. He was in combat coveralls and a recently gelled wound was livid across his forehead and down one cheek. He looked tired.

“This is Northern Rim Control to incoming FAL 931/4. We have your flight plan and mission filed but must warn you that under current circumstances we cannot afford ground or close detail aerial support. Wedge forces have fallen back to the Masson lake system where we are holding a defensive stance until the Kempist offensive has been assessed and its consequences correlated. A full-scale jamming offensive is expected in the wake of the bombing, so this is probably the last time you’ll be able to communicate effectively with anyone outside the blast zone. Additional to these strategic considerations, you should be aware that the Cartel have deployed experimental nanorepair systems in the Sauberville area. We cannot predict how these systems will react to unexpected incursions. Personally,” he leaned forward in the screen, “my advice would be to withdraw on secondary drives as far as Masson and wait until I can order a reprise front back-up to the coast. This shouldn’t involve a delay of any more than two weeks. Blast research,” a ripple of distaste passed across his face, as if he had just caught the odour of something rotting in his wounds, “is hardly a priority worthy of the risks you are running, whatever competitive advantage your masters may hope to gain from it. A Wedge incoming code is attached, should you wish to avail yourself of the fallback option. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do for you. Good luck. Out.”

I unmasked and pushed back the headset. Hand was watching me with a faint smile tucked into one corner of his mouth.

“Hardly a Cartel-approved perspective. Is he always that blunt?”

“In the face of client stupidity, yes. It’s why they pay him. What’s this about experimental—”

Hand made a tiny shutdown gesture with one hand. Shook his head.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Standard Cartel scare line. It keeps unwanted personnel out of the no-go zones.”

“Meaning you called it in that way?”

Hand smiled again. Sutjiadi said nothing, but his lips tightened. Outside, the engine note shrilled.

“We’re on the beach,” said Ameli Vongsavath. “Twenty-one point seven kilometres from the Sauberville crater. Pictures, anybody?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Clotted white.

For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.

“Gulls,” said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. “Radiation from the blast must have got them.”

Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.

When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV—and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter—they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.

The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded, with the minds of the colony elite decanted, awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.

Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.

Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.

So. Back to the lab.

It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.

On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.

Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.

A year passed.

Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.

Back to the lab.

These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.

Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth—tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.

The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.

The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.

There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.

“Nobody down here either,” said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. “Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.”

Sutjiadi frowned. “There’s food out?”

“Yeah, lots of it.” Deprez hauled himself out: of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. “Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.”

“I’ve had parties like that,” said Vongsavath.

Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.

“Cruickshank is shooting the rats,” he said. “They are quite large.”

Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. “Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?”

“Rats?” Deprez’s grin widened. “It is hard to tell.”

I repressed a smile of my own.

“Crew,” said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. “How many crew, sergeant?

Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. “I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.”

“I used to be a chef,” said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. “Maybe I’ll go down and look.”

“You stay here.” Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. “Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.”

Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.

“My kind of work,” he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.

The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.

“…is secured.” It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.

“Secured how?” he snapped.

“We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.” Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. “That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.”

“What about the uh, the mission objective?” I broke in. “Is it intact?”

Sutjiadi snorted. “Is it there?”

I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.

I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.

Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.

“Yes, it’s here.” There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. “It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Sun? Is it open?”

“Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.”

I cleared my throat. “Wardani? You there?”

“Busy.” Her voice was taut. “What did you find on the boat?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Yeah, well. Same here. Out.”

I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.

The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.

Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.

It turned out worth it.

Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.

We stood looking up at them for a while.

“Good guess,” I said to Sutjiadi.

“It made sense to look.” He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. “They’ve been stripped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?”

“Yeah, but nobody did,” Vongsavath pointed out.

Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. “The war?”

I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. “Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.” I nodded towards the twists of smoke. “They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?”

“Vividly,” said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.

“That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.”

“So why hide these guys at all?” asked Cruickshank.

I shrugged. “Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.”

“Indigo City,” said Sutjiadi pointedly.

“Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.” Cruickshank grinned. “He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a fucking compliment!”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.”

“It does if the boat was hired in Sauberville.” Sutjiadi shook his head. “Bought even, it’s still local interest. Who were those guys? Isn’t that old Chang’s trawler out there? Come on, Kovacs, it’s only a couple of dozen kilometres.”

“There’s no reason to assume this boat’s local.” I gestured out at the placid ocean. “On this planet you could sail a boat like this one all the way up from Bootkinaree and never spill your coffee.”

“Yeah, but you could hide the bodies from aerial surveillance by chucking them down into the galley with the rest of the mess,” objected Cruickshank. “It doesn’t add up.”

Luc Deprez reached up and shifted the net slightly. The skulls bobbed and leaned. “The stacks are gone,” he said. “They were put in the water to hide the rest of their identity. Faster than leaving them for the rats, I think.”

“Depends on the rats.”

“Are you an expert?”

“Maybe it was a burial,” offered Ameli Vongsavath.

“In a net?”

“We’re wasting time,” said Sutjiadi loudly. “Deprez, get them down, wrap them up and put them somewhere the rats can’t get at them. We’ll run a post mortem with the autosurgeon back on the Nagini later. Vongsavath and Cruickshank, I want you to go through this boat from beak to backside. Look for anything that might tell us what happened here.”

“That’s stem to stern, sir,” said Vongsavath primly.

“Whatever. Anything that might tell us something. The clothing that came off these two maybe or…” He shook his head, irritable with the awkward new factors. “Anything. Anything at all. Get on with it. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like you to come with me. I want to check on our perimeter defences.”

“Sure.” I scooped up the lie with a slight smile.

Sutjiadi didn’t want to check on the perimeter. He’d seen Sun and Hansen’s résumés, just like me. They didn’t need their work checking.

He didn’t want to see the perimeter.

He wanted to see the gate.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Schneider had described it to me, several times. Wardani had sketched it for me once in a quiet moment at Roespinoedji’s. An imaging shop on the Angkor Road had run up a 3-D graphic from Wardani’s input for the Mandrake pitch. Later, Hand had the Mandrake machines blow up the image to a full-scale construct we could walk around in virtual.

None of it came close.

It stood in the man-made cavern like some vertically stretched vision from the Dimensionalist school, some element out of the nightmare technomilitary landscapes of Mhlongo or Osupile. There was a gaunt foldedness to the structure, like six or seven ten-metre tall vampire bats crushed back to back in a defensive phalanx. There was none of the passive openness that the word ‘gate’ suggested. In the soft light filtering down through chinks in the rocks above, the whole thing looked hunched and waiting.

The base was triangular, about five metres on a side, though the lower edges bore less resemblance to a geometric shape than to something that had grown down into the ground like tree roots. The material was an alloy I’d seen in Martian architecture before, a dense black-clouded surface that would feel like marble or onyx to the touch but always carried a faint static charge. The technoglyph panelling was dull green and ruby, mapped in odd, irregular waves around the lower section, but never rising higher than a metre and a half from the ground. Towards the top of this limit, the symbols seemed to lose both coherence and strength—they thinned out, grew less well defined and even the style of the engraving seemed more hesitant. It was as if, Sun said later, the Martian technoscribes were afraid to work too close to what they had created on the plinth above.

Above, the structure folded rapidly in on itself as it rose, creating a series of compressed black alloy angles and upward leading edges that ended in a short spire. In the long splits between the folds, the black clouding on the alloy faded to a dirty translucence and inside this, the geometry seemed to continue folding in on itself in some indefinable way which was painful to look at for too long.

“Believe it now?” I asked Sutjiadi, as he stood beside me, staring. He didn’t respond for a moment, and when he did there was the same slight numbness in his voice that I’d heard from Sun Liping over the comlink.

“It is not still,” he said quietly. “It feels. In motion. Like turning.”

“Maybe it is.” Sun had come up with us, leaving the rest of the team down by the Nagini. No one else seemed overkeen to spend time either in or near the cavern.

“It’s supposed to be a hyperspatial link,” I said, moving sideways in an attempt to break the hold the thing’s alien geometry was exerting. “If it maintains a line through to wherever, then maybe it moves in hyperspace, even when it’s shut down.”

“Or maybe it cycles,” Sun suggested. “Like a beacon.”

Unease.

I felt it course through me at the same time as I spotted it in the twitch across Sutjiadi’s face. Bad enough that we were pinned down here on this exposed tongue of land without the added thought that the thing we had come to unlock might be sending off ‘come and get me’ signals in a dimension we as a species had only the vaguest of handles on.

“We’re going to need some lights in here,” I said.

The spell broke. Sutjiadi blinked hard and looked up at the falling rays of light. They were greying out with perceptible speed as evening advanced across the sky outside.

“We’ll have it blasted out,” he said.

I exchanged an alarmed glance with Sun.

“Have what blasted?” I asked cautiously.

Sutjiadi gestured. “The rock. Nagini runs a front-mounted ultravibe battery for ground assault. Hansen should be able to clear the whole thing back this far without putting a scratch on the artefact.”

Sun coughed. “I don’t think Commander Hand will approve that, sir. He ordered me to bring up a set of Angier lamps before dark. And Mistress Wardani has asked for remote monitoring systems to be installed so she can work direct on the gate from—”

“Alright, lieutenant. Thank you.” Sutjiadi looked around the cavern once more. “I’ll talk to Commander Hand.”

He strode out. I glanced at Sun and winked.

“That’s a conversation I want to hear,” I said.

Back at the Nagini, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang were busy erecting the first of the rapid deployment bubblefabs. Hand was braced in one corner of the assault ship’s loading hatch, watching a cross-legged Wardani sketch something on a memoryboard. There was an unguarded fascination in his expression that made him look suddenly younger. “Some problem, captain?” he asked, as we came up the ramp.

“I want that thing,” said Sutjiadi, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, “out in the open. Where we can watch it. I’m having Hansen ‘vibe-blast the rocks out of the way.”

“Out of the question.” Hand went back to watching what the archaeologue was doing. “We can’t risk exposure at this stage.”

“Or damage to the gate,” said Wardani sharply.

“Or damage to the gate,” agreed the executive. “I’m afraid your team are going to have to work with the cavern as it is, captain. I don’t believe there’s any risk involved. The bracing the previous visitors put in appears to be solid.”

“I’ve seen the bracing,” said Sutjiadi. “Bonding epoxy is not a substitute for a permanent structure, but that’s—”

“Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it,” Hand’s urbane tone was edged with irritation. “But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.”

“I was going to say,” Sutjiadi said evenly, “That the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.”

Wardani looked up from her sketching.

“Well that’s good, captain,” she said brightly. “You’ve gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours real time. What exactly are you concerned about?”

Sutjiadi looked uncomfortable.

“This artefact,” he said. “You claim it’s a gate. Can you give me any guarantees that nothing will come through it from the other side?”

“Not really, no.”

“Do you have any idea what might come through?”

Wardani smiled. “Not really, no.”

“Then I’m sorry, Mistress Wardani. It makes military sense to have the Nagini’s main weaponry trained on it at all times.”

“This is not a military operation, captain.” Hand was working on, ostentatiously bored now. “I thought I made that clear during briefing. You are part of a commercial venture, and the specifics of our commerce dictate that the artefact cannot be exposed to aerial view until it is contractually secured. By the terms of the Incorporation Charter, that will not become the case until what is on the other side of the gateway is tagged with a Mandrake ownership buoy.”

“And if the gate chooses to open before we are ready, and something hostile comes through it?”

“Something hostile?” Wardani set aside her memoryboard, apparently amused. “Something such as what?”

“You would be in a better position than I to evaluate that, Mistress Wardani,” said Sutjiadi stiffly. “My concern is simply for the safety of this expedition.”

Wardani sighed.

“They weren’t vampires, captain,” she said wearily.

“I’m sorry?”

“The Martians. They weren’t vampires. Or demons. They were just a technologically advanced race with wings. That’s all. There’s nothing on the other side of that thing,” she stabbed a finger in the general direction of the rocks, “that we won’t be able to build ourselves in a few thousand years. If we can get a lock on our militaristic tendencies, that is.”

“Is that intended as an insult, Mistress Wardani?”

“Take it any way you like, captain. We are, all of us, already, dying slowly of radiation poisoning. A couple of dozen kilometres in that direction a hundred thousand people were vaporised yesterday. By soldiers.” Her voice was starting to rise, trembling at base. “Anywhere else on about sixty per cent of this planet’s land mass, your chances of an early, violent death are excellent. At the hands of soldiers. Elsewhere, the camps will kill you with starvation or beatings if you step out of political line. This service too, brought to us by soldiers. Is there something else I can add to clarify my reading of militarism for you?”

“Mistress Wardani.” Hand’s voice held a tight strain I hadn’t heard before. Below the ramp, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang had stopped what they were doing and were looking over towards the raised voices. “I think we’re getting off the point. We were discussing security.”

“Were we?” Wardani forced a shaky laugh, and her voice evened out. “Well, captain. Let me put it to you that in the seven decades I have been a qualified archaeologue, I have never come across evidence to suggest that the Martians had anything more unpleasant to offer than what men like you have already unleashed across the face of Sanction IV. Excluding the small matter of the fallout from Sauberville, you are probably safer sitting in front of that gate than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere at the moment.”

There was a small silence.

“Maybe you want to train the Nagini’s main guns on the entrance to the cavern,” I suggested. “Same effect. In fact, with the remote monitoring in place, it’ll be better. If the monsters with half-metre fangs turn up, we can collapse the tunnel on them.”

“A good point.” Seemingly casual, Hand moved to position himself carefully in the hatch between Wardani and Sutjiadi. “That seems the best compromise, does it not, captain?”

Sutjiadi read the executive’s stance and took the hint. He threw a salute and turned on his heel. As he went down the ramp past me, he glanced up. He didn’t quite have his previous immobility of feature down with the new Maori face. He looked betrayed.

You find innocence in the strangest places.

At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.

“Hansen,” he snapped tightly. “Jiang. Get all of this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred metres from the ship on all sides.”

Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking—he’d already stalked away towards the water’s edge.

Something wasn’t right.

Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a swirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ‘fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms, separated by a central living space but two of the units had been assembled in a non-standard configuration with half the bedspace, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.

I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.

The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.

“What do you want?” she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

“It’s me.”

“I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?”

“An invitation over the threshold?”

She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.

“We’re not in virtual any more, Kovacs. I—”

“I wasn’t looking for a fuck.”

She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. “That’s just as well.”

“So do I get to come in?”

“Suit yourself.”

I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme—sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.

“Getting anywhere?”

“Slowly.” She yawned. “I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.”

I propped myself against a table edge.

“So how long do you reckon?”

She shrugged. “A couple of days. Then there’s testing.”

“How long for that?”

“The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?”

I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131 and all their numerous friends, like a ‘methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin, and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jewelled presence.

I twitched despite myself.

“I’m just curious.”

“An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.”

I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. “I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.”

“Well, I suppose you’d know.”

It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp—in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared—but she never flinched as the words came out.

“Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?”

“I told you we’re not in virtual any more.”

“No.”

I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,” she said heavily. “Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.”

“You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.”

“Is there something to talk about?” She didn’t look round.

“Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.” I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. “I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything either.”

That got her looking at me.

“Why?”

“Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.” I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. “And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.”

“You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?” she asked scornfully. “The vampires got them?”

“Something got them,” I said mildly. “They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.”

“Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. Any civilisation that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitise consciousness.”

“There’s no actual evidence for that.”

“Not even common sense?”

“Common sense?” The scorn was back in her voice. “The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes round the earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.”

“I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.”

“Yeah, haven’t we all,” she said shortly. “Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit re-sleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.”

“In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.”

“No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.”

“Do you believe it?”

She sighed and went back to her seat. “Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cosy little certainties human science is handing round. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half of the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living-room wall.” She paused. “And it’s probably upside down.”

I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the ‘fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.

“No, I mean it,” she muttered. “You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.”

“OK, fine.” I followed her back to the centre of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando, the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind, was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. “But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.”

“I’m just warning you.”

“OK, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?”

“Outside of my own team?” She considered. “We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artefact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.”

“You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.”

“Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.”

“Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.”

“I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.”

“And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?”

“No.” She gave me a crooked smile. “The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realised what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.”

“And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?”

“Got it in one.” She shrugged. “It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, rubbished because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.”

I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.

“It sounds familiar enough.”

“I think,” She hesitated. “I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.” She smiled. “I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.”

She sighed and rid herself of the smile.

“Next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we’d lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we’d be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we’d be back from the academic wilderness of course, but only at a price. We’d be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn’t too much Wycinski in the text. There’d be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy,” she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad, “on someone else’s projects. We’d be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.”

“Better than not getting paid at all.”

A grimace. “If I’d wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically-appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.”

“Did the others feel that strongly?”

“In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.”

I nodded.

“Could that be who we found in the nets?”

She looked away. “I suppose so.”

“How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?”

“I don’t know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified, there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Techakriengkrai. They were all good. But on their own? Working backwards from our notes, working together?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I’ve got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don’t even know how I’ll perform any more.”

A memory of her beneath the waterfall flickered, unfairly, off the comment. It coiled around itself in my guts. I groped after the thread of my thoughts.

“Well, there’ll be DNA files for them in the Guild archives at Landfall.”

“Yes.”

“And we can run a DNA match from the bones—”

“Yes, I know.”

“—but it’s going to be hard to get through and access data in Landfall from here. And to be honest, I’m not sure what purpose it’ll serve. I don’t much care who they are. I just want to know how they ended up in that net.”

She shivered.

“If it’s them,” she began, then stopped. “I don’t want to know who it is, Kovacs. I can live without that.”

I thought about reaching for her, across the small space between our chairs, but sitting there she seemed suddenly as gaunt and folded as the thing we had come here to unlock. I couldn’t see a point of contact anywhere on her body that would not make my touch seem intrusive, overtly sexual or just ridiculous.

The moment passed. Died.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” I said, standing up. “You probably better do the same. Sutjiadi’s going to want a crack-of-dawn start.”

She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.

I left her alone amidst the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I’d taken to hold it down. There was grey light filtering through the bubblefab’s dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen…

Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see?

Semetaire?

I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider towelling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.

“Morning,” he frothed.

“Morning.” I propped myself upright. “What time is it?”

“Little after five.” He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. “Wouldn’t be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I’m a light sleeper.”

I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.

“Fucking psycho,” I grumbled.

“Hey, he’s in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.”

“Yeah, but Jiang’s the only one with insomnia, it appears.” I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it manifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.

Rush/snap!

“Haiii!!!”

“Right.”

I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. “I’m awake now. You finished with that brush?”

Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life and stepped into the shower niche.

Rise and shine.

Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clear-headed, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swivelling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the ‘fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.

I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab and sipped, watching.

“Was there something?” Jiang asked, as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he’d razored the Maori sleeve’s thick dark hair back to an even two centimetres all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.

“You do this every morning?”

“Yes.” The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.

“Impressive.”

“Necessary.” Another death blow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. “Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.”

I nodded. “Hayashi.”

The patterns slowed fractionally.

“You have read him?”

“Met him once.”

Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. “You met Toru Hayashi?”

“I’m older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.”

“You are an Envoy?”

“Was.”

For a moment, he seemed unsure what to say. I wondered if he thought I was joking. Then he brought his arms forward, sheathed his right fist at chest height in the cup of his left hand and bowed slightly over the grasp.

“Takeshi-san, if I offended you with my talk of fear yesterday, I apologise. I am a fool.”

“No problem. I wasn’t offended. We all deal with it different ways. You planning on breakfast?”

He pointed across the living space to where the table had been pushed back to the canvasynth wall. There was fresh fruit piled on a shallow bowl and what looked like slices of rye bread.

“Mind if I join you?”

“I would be. Honoured.”

We were still eating when Schneider came back from wherever he’d been for the last twenty minutes.

“Meeting in the main ‘fab,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing into the dormitory. He emerged a minute later. “Fifteen minutes. Sutjiadi seems to think everyone should be there.”

He was gone again.

Jiang was half to his feet when I put out a hand and gestured him back to his seat.

“Take it easy. He said fifteen minutes.”

“I wish to shower and change,” said Jiang, a little stiffly.

“I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Finish your breakfast, for Christ’s sake. In a couple of days from now it’ll make you sick to the stomach just to swallow food. Enjoy the flavours while you can.”

He sat back down with a strange expression on his face.

“Do you mind, Takeshi-san, if I ask you a question?”

“Why am I no longer an Envoy?” I saw the confirmation in his eyes. “Call it an ethical revelation. I was at Innenin.”

“I have read about it.”

“Hayashi again?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, well, Hayashi’s account is pretty close, but he wasn’t there. That’s why he comes off ambiguous about the whole thing. Didn’t feel fit to judge. I was there, and I’m eminently fit to judge. They fucked us. No one’s too clear on whether they actually intended to or not, but I’m here to tell you that doesn’t matter. My friends died—really died—when there was no need. That’s what counts.”

“Yet, as a soldier, surely you must—”

“Jiang, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I try not to think of myself as a soldier any more. I’m trying to evolve.”

“Then what do you consider yourself?” His voice stayed polite, but his demeanour had tightened and his food was forgotten on his plate. “What have you evolved into?”

I shrugged. “Difficult to say. Something better, at any rate. A paid killer, maybe?”

The whites of his eyes flared. I sighed.

“I’m sorry if that offends you, Jiang, but it’s the truth. You probably don’t want to hear it, most soldiers don’t. When you put on that uniform, you’re saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.”

“That is Quellism.” He all but reared back from the table as he said it.

“Maybe. That doesn’t stop it being true.” I couldn’t quite work out why I was bothering with this man. Maybe it was something about his ninja calm, the way it begged to be shattered. Or maybe it was just being woken up early by his tightly controlled killing dance. “Jiang, ask yourself, what are you going to do when your superior officer orders you to plasma-bomb some hospital full of injured children?”

“There are certain actions—”

“No!” The snap in my own voice surprised me. “Soldiers don’t get to make those kinds of choices. Look out the window, Jiang. Mixed in with that black stuff you see blowing around out there, there’s a thin coating of fat molecules that used to be people. Men, women, children, all vaporised by some soldier under orders from some superior officer. Because they were in the way.”

“That was a Kempist action.”

“Oh, please.”

“I would not carry out—”

“Then you’re no longer a soldier, Jiang. Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldier. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”

He got up.

“I am going to change,” he said coldly. “Please present my apologies to Captain Sutjiadi for the delay.”

“Sure.” I picked up a kiwi fruit from the table and bit through the skin. “See you there.”

I watched him retreat to the other dormitory, then got up from the table and wandered out into the morning, still chewing the furred bitterness of the kiwi skin amidst the fruit.

Outside, the camp was coming slowly to life. On my way to the assembly ‘fab I spotted Ameli Vongsavath crouched under one of the Nagini’s support struts while Yvette Cruickshank helped her lift part of the hydraulic system clear for inspection. With Wardani bunking in her lab, the three remaining females had ended up sharing a ‘fab, whether by accident or design I didn’t know. None of the male team members had tried for the fourth bunk.

Cruickshank saw me and waved.

“Sleep well?” I called out.

She grinned back. “Like the fucking dead.”

Hand was waiting at the door to the assembly ‘fab, the clean angles of his face freshly shaven, the chameleochrome coveralls immaculate. There was a faint tang of spice in the air that I thought might come from something on his hair. He looked so much like a net ad for officer training that I could cheerfully have shot him in the face as soon as said good morning.

“Morning.”

“Good morning, lieutenant. How did you sleep?”

“Briefly.”

Inside, three-quarters of the space was given over to the assembly hall, the rest walled off for Hand’s use. In the assembly space, a dozen memoryboard-equipped chairs had been set out in an approximate ring and Sutjiadi was busy with a map projector, spinning up a table-sized central image of the beach and surroundings, punching in tags and making notes on his own chair’s board. He looked up as I came in.

“Kovacs, good. If you’ve got no objections, I’m going to send you out on the bike with Sun this morning.”

I yawned. “Sounds like fun.”

“Yes, well that isn’t the primary purpose. I want to string a secondary ring of remotes a few kilometres back to give us a response edge, and while Sun’s doing that she can’t be watching her own ass. You get the turret duty. I’ll have Hansen and Cruickshank start at the north end and swing inland. You and Sun go south, do the same thing.” He gave me a thin smile. “See if you can’t arrange to meet somewhere in the middle.”

I nodded.

“Humour.” I took a seat and slumped in it. “You want to watch that, Sutjiadi. Stuff’s addictive.”

Up on the seaward slopes of Dangrek’s spine, the devastation at Sauberville was clearer. You could see where the fireball had blasted a cavity into the hook at the end of the peninsula and let the sea in, changing the whole shape of the coastline. Around the crater, smoke was still crawling into the sky, but from up here you could make out the myriad tiny fires that fed the flow, dull red like the beacons used to flag potential flashpoints on a political map.

Of the buildings, the city itself, there was nothing left at all.

“You’ve got to hand it to Kemp,” I said, mostly to the wind coming in off the sea, “he doesn’t mess about with decision-making by committee. There’s no bigger picture with this guy. Soon as it looks like he’s losing, bam! He just calls in the angelfire.”

“Sorry?” Sun Liping was still engrossed in the innards of the sentry system we had just planted. “You talking to me?”

“Not really.”

“Then you were talking to yourself?” Her brows arched over her work. “That’s a bad sign, Kovacs.”

I grunted and shifted in the gunner’s saddle. The grav bike was canted at an angle on the rough grass, mounted Sunjets cranked down to maintain a level bead on the landward horizon. They twitched from time to time, motion trackers chasing the wind through the grass or maybe some small animal that had somehow managed not to die when the blast hit Sauberville.

“Alright, we’re done.” Sun closed up the inspection hatch and stood back, watching the turret reel drunkenly to its feet and turn to face the mountains. It firmed up as the ultravibe battery snicked out of the upper carapace, as if it suddenly recalled its purpose in life. The hydraulic system settled it into a squat that took the bulk of the body below line of sight for anyone coming up this particular ridge. A fairweather sensor crept out of the armour below the gun segment and flexed in the air. The whole machine looked absurdly like a starved frog in hiding, testing the air with one especially emaciated foreleg.

I chinned the contact mike.

“Cruickshank, this is Kovacs. You paying attention?”

“Nothing but.” The rapid deployment commando came back laconic. “Where you at, Kovacs?”

“We have number six fed and watered. Moving on to site five. We should have line of sight on you soon. Make sure you keep your tags where they can be read.”

“Relax, will you? I do this for a living.”

“That didn’t save you last time, did it?”

I heard her snort. “Low blow, man. Low blow. How many times you been dead anyway, Kovacs?”

“A few,” I admitted.

“So.” Her voice rose derisively. “Shut the fuck up.”

“See you soon, Cruickshank.”

“Not if I get you in my sights first. Out.”

Sun climbed aboard the bike.

“She likes you,” she said over her shoulder. “Just for your information. Ameli and I spent most of last night hearing what she’d like to do to you in a locked escape pod.”

“Good to know. You weren’t sworn to secrecy then?”

Sun fired up the motors and the wind shield snipped shut around us. “I think,” she said meditatively, “the idea was that one of us would tell you as soon as possible. Her family are from the Limon Highlands back on Latimer, and from what I hear the Limon girls don’t mess about when they want something plugging in.” She turned to look at me. “Her choice of words, not mine.”

I grinned.

“Of course she’ll need to hurry,” Sun went on, busying herself with the controls. “In a few days none of us’ll have any libido left worth talking about.”

I lost the grin.

We lifted and coasted slowly along the seaward side of the ridge. The grav bike was a comfortable ride, even weighed down with loaded panniers, and with the wind screen on, conversation was easy.

“Do you think the archaeologue can open the gate as she claims?” Sun asked.

“If anyone can.”

“If anyone can,” she repeated thoughtfully.

I thought about the psychodynamic repairs I had done on Wardani, the bruised interior landscape I had had to open up, peeling it back like bandaging that had gone septic and stiffened into the flesh beneath. And there at the core, the tightly wired centredness that had allowed her to survive the damage.

She had wept when the opening took hold, but she cried wide-eyed, like someone fighting the weight of drowsiness, blinking the tears out of her eyes, hands clenched into fists at her sides, teeth gritted.

I woke her up, but she brought herself back.

“Scratch that,” I said. “She can do it. No question.”

“You show remarkable faith.” There was no criticism in Sun’s voice that I could hear. “Strange in a man who works so hard at burying himself beneath the weight of disbelief.”

“It isn’t faith,” I said shortly. “It’s knowledge. There’s a big difference.”

“Yet I understand Envoy conditioning provides insights that readily transform the one into the other.”

“Who told you I was an Envoy?”

“You did.” This time I thought I could detect a smile in Sun’s voice. “Well, at least, you told Deprez, and I was listening.”

“Very astute of you.”

“Thank you. Is my information accurate then?”

“Not really, no. Where did you hear it?”

“My family is originally from Hun Home. There, we have a Chinese name for the Envoys.” She made a short string of tightly sung syllables. “It means One who makes Facts from Belief.”

I grunted. I’d heard something similar on New Beijing a couple of decades ago. Most of the colonial cultures have built myths around the Envoys at one time or another.

“You sound unimpressed.”

“Well, it’s a bad translation. What the Envoys have is just an intuition enhancement system. You know. You’re going out, it’s not a bad day but you take a jacket on impulse. Later it rains. How does that work?”

She looked over her shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. “Luck?”

“Could be luck. But what’s more likely is that systems in your mind and body that you’re not aware of measure the environment at some subconscious level and just occasionally manage to squirt the message through all the superego programming. Envoy training takes that and refines it so your superego and subconscious get along better. It’s nothing to do with belief, it’s just a sense of something underlying. You make the connections and from that you can assemble a skeleton model of the truth. Later on, you go back and fill in the gaps. Gifted detectives have been doing it for centuries unaided. This is just the superamped version.” Suddenly I was tired of the words coming out of my mouth, the glib flow of human systems specs that you could wrap yourself in to escape the emotional realities of what you did for a living. “So tell me, Sun. How did you get from Hun Home to here?”

“Not me, my parents. They were contract biosystems analysts. They came here on the needlecast when the Hun Home cooperatives bought into settling Sanction IV. Their personalities, I mean. DHF’d into custom-grown clones from Sino stock on Latimer. All part of the deal.”

“Are they still here?”

She hunched her shoulders slightly. “No. They retired to Latimer several years ago. The settlement contract paid very well.”

“You didn’t want to go with them?”

“I was born on Sanction IV. This is my home.” Sun looked back at me again. “I imagine you have a problem understanding that.”

“Not really. I’ve seen worse places to belong.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Sharya for one. Right! Go right!”

The bike dipped and banked. Admirable responses from Sun in her new sleeve. I shifted in my saddle, scanning the hillscape. My hands went to the flying grips of the mounted Sunjet set and jerked it down to manual height. On the move it wasn’t much good as an automated weapon without some very careful programming and we hadn’t had time for that.

“There’s something moving out there.” I chinned the mike. “Cruickshank, we’ve got movement across here. Want to join the party?”

The reply crisped back. “On our way. Stay tagged.”

“Can you see it?” asked Sun.

“If I could see it, I’d have shot it. What about the scope?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“I think…” We crested a hillock and Sun’s voice came back, cursing, by the sound of it, in Mandarin. She booted the bike sideways and swung about, creeping up another metre from the ground. Peering down over her shoulder, I saw what we’d been looking for.

“What the fuck is that?” I whispered.

On another scale, I might have thought I was looking at a recently hatched nest of the bio-engineered maggots they use for cleaning wounds. The grey mass that writhed on the grass below us had the same slick-wet consistency and self-referential motion, like a million microscopic pairs of hands washing themselves and each other. But there would have been enough maggots here for every wound inflicted on Sanction IV in the last month. We were looking at a sphere of seething activity over a metre across, pushed gently about on the hillside like a gas-filled balloon. Where the shadow of the bike fell across it, bulges formed on the surface and bulked upwards, bursting like blisters with a soft popping and falling back into the substance of the main body.

“Look,” said Sun quietly. “It likes us.”

“What the fuck is it?”

“I didn’t know the first time you asked me.”

She nudged the bike back to the slope we’d just crested, and put us down. I lowered the Sunjet discharge channels to focus on our new playmate.

“Do you think this is far enough away?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said grimly. “If it even twitches this way, I’m going to blast it apart on general principles. Whatever it is.”

“That strikes me as unsophisticated.”

“Yeah, well. Just call me Sutjiadi.”

The thing, whatever it was, seemed to have calmed down now we no longer cast a shadow on its surface. The internal writhing motion went on, but there was no sign of a coordinated lateral move in our direction. I leaned on the Sunjet mounting and watched, wondering briefly if we weren’t somehow still back in the Mandrake construct, looking at another probability dysfunction like the grey cloud that had obscured Sauberville while its fate was still undecided.

A dull droning reached my ears.

“Here come the blam blam crew.” I scanned the ridge northward, spotted the other bike and neurachem’d a close-up. Cruickshank’s hair bannered out against the sky from her perch behind the weaponry. They had the windscreen powered back to a driver’s cone for speed. Hansen drove hunched forward into it, intent. I was surprised at the warm rush the sight kicked off inside me.

Wolf gene splice, I registered irritably. Never shake it.

Good old Carrera. Never misses a trick, the old bastard.

“We should ‘cast this back to Hand,” Sun was saying. “The Cartel archives may have something on it.”

Carrera’s voice drifted through my mind.

the Cartel have deployed

I looked back at the seething grey mass with new eyes.

Fuck.

Hansen brought the bike to a juddering halt alongside us and leaned on the handlebars. His brow furrowed.

“Wha—”

“We don’t know what the fuck it is,” Sun broke in tartly.

“Yes we do,” I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hand looked impassively at the projected image for a long moment after Sun froze the film. No one else was looking at the holodisplay any more. Seated in the ring, or crowding in at the bubblefab’s door, they were looking at him.

“Nanotech, right?” Hansen said it for everyone.

Hand nodded. His face was a mask, but to the Envoy-tuned senses I had deployed, the anger came smoking off him in waves.

“Experimental nanotech,” I said. “I thought that was a standard scare line, Hand. Nothing to worry about.”

“It usually is,” he said evenly.

“I’ve worked with military nanosystems,” said Hansen. “And I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” Hand loosened slightly and leaned forward to gesture at the holodisplay. “This is new. What you’re looking at here is a null configuration. The nanobes have no specific programming to follow.”

“So what are they doing?” asked Ameli Vongsavath.

Hand looked surprised. “Nothing. They are doing nothing, Mistress Vongsavath. Exactly that. They feed off the radiation from the blast, they reproduce at a modest rate and they. Exist. Those are the only designed parameters.”

“Sounds harmless,” said Cruickshank dubiously.

I saw Sutjiadi and Hansen exchange glances.

“Harmless, certainly, as things stand now.” Hand hit a stud on his chair’s board and the frozen image vanished. “Captain, I think it’s best if we wrap this up for now. Would I be right in assuming the sensors we have strung should warn us of any unforeseen developments ahead of time?”

Sutjiadi frowned.

“Anything that moves will show up,” he agreed. “But—”

“Excellent. Then we should all get back to work.”

A murmur ran round the briefing circle. Someone snorted. Sutjiadi snapped icily for quiet. Hand stood up and pushed through the flap to his quarters. Ole Hansen jerked his chin after the executive, and a ripple of supportive muttering broke out. Sutjiadi reprised his shut-the-fuck-up frost, and started handing out tasks.

I waited it out. The members of the Dangrek team drifted out in ones and twos, the last of them ushered out by Sutjiadi. Tanya Wardani hovered briefly at the door to the bubblefab on her way out, looking in my direction, but Schneider said something in her ear and the two of them followed the general flow. Sutjiadi gave me a hard stare when he saw I was staying, but he walked away. I gave it another couple of minutes, then got up and went to the flap of Hand’s quarters. I touched the chime and walked in.

Hand was stretched out on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling. He barely looked in my direction.

“What do you want, Kovacs?”

I snapped out a chair and sat in it. “Well, less tinsel than you’re currently deploying would be a start.”

“I don’t believe I’ve told any lies to anyone recently. And I try to keep track.”

“You haven’t told much truth either. Not to the grunts anyway, and with spec ops, I think that’s a mistake. They aren’t stupid.”

“No, they aren’t stupid.” He said it with the detachment of a botanist labelling specimens. “But they’re paid, and that’s as good or better.”

I examined the side of my hand. “I’ve been paid too, but that won’t stop me ripping your throat out if I find you’re trying to tinsel me.”

Silence. If the threat bothered him, it didn’t show.

“So,” I said at last, “you going to tell me what’s going on with the nanotech?”

“Nothing is going on. What I told Mistress Vongsavath was accurate. The nanobes are in a null configuration because they are doing precisely nothing.”

“Come on, Hand. If they’re doing nothing, then what are you so bent out of shape about?”

He stared at the ceiling of the bubblefab for a while. He seemed fascinated by the dull grey lining of the bubblefab’s ceiling. I was on the point of getting up and hauling him bodily off the bed, but something in the Envoy conditioning held me in place. Hand was working through something.

“Do you know,” he murmured, “the great thing about wars like this?”

“Keeps the population from thinking too hard?”

A faint smile flitted across his face.

“The potential for innovation,” he said.

The assertion seemed to give him sudden energy. He swung his feet off the bed and sat up, elbows on knees, hands clasped. His eyes bored into mine.

“What do you think of the Protectorate, Kovacs?”

“You’re joking, right?”

He shook his head. “No games. No entrapment. What’s the Protectorate to you?”

“The skeletal grip of a corpse’s hand round eggs trying to hatch?”

“Very lyrical, but I didn’t ask you what Quell called it. I asked what you think.”

I shrugged. “I think she was right.”

Hand nodded.

“Yes,” he said simply. “She was right. The human race has straddled the stars. We’ve plumbed the insides of a dimension we have no senses to perceive in order to do it. We’ve built societies on worlds so far apart that the fastest ships we have would take half a millennium to get from one side of our sphere of influence to the other. And you know how we did all that?”

“I think I’ve heard this speech.”

“The corporations did it. Not governments. Not politicians. Not this fucking joke Protectorate we pay lip service to. Corporate planning gave us the vision, corporate investment paid for it, and corporate employees built it.”

“Let’s hear it for the corporations.” I patted my palms together, half a dozen dry strokes.

Hand ignored it. “And when we were done, what happened? The UN came and they muzzled us. They stripped us of the powers they’d awarded us for the diaspora. They levied their taxes again, they rewrote their protocols. They castrated us.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Hand.”

“You’re not funny, Kovacs. Do you have any idea what technological advances we might have made by now if that muzzle hadn’t gone back on. Do you know how fast we were during the diaspora?”

“I’ve read about it.”

“In spaceflight, in cryogenics, in bioscience, in machine intelligence.” He ticked them off on bent-back fingers. “A century of advances in less than a decade. A global tetrameth rush for the entire scientific community. And it all stopped with the Protectorate protocols. We’d have fucking faster-than-light spaceflight by now if they hadn’t stopped us. Guaranteed.”

“Easy to say now. I think you’re omitting a few inconvenient historical details, but that’s not really the point. You’re trying to tell me the Protectorate has unwritten the protocols for you, just so you can get this little war won at speed?”

“In essence, yes.” His hands made shaping motions in the space between his knees. “It’s not official, of course. No more than all those Protectorate dreadnoughts that aren’t officially anywhere near Sanction IV. But unofficially, every member of the Cartel has a mandate to push war-related product development to the hilt, and then further.”

“And that’s what’s squirming around out there? Pushed-to-the-hilt nanoware?”

Hand compressed his lips. “SUS-L. Smart Ultra Short-Lived nanobe systems.”

“Sounds promising. So what does it do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh for f—”

“No.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know. None of us do. It’s a new front. They’re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems.”

“The OPERN System? That’s just so fucking cute. And it’s a weapon?”

“Of course it is.”

“So how does it work?”

“Kovacs, you don’t listen.” There was a dreary kind of enthusiasm building in his voice now. “It’s an evolving system. Smart evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way—imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we’re only just starting to map what it can do. They’ve modelled it in high-speed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like grasshoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact.”

“Oh. Good.”

“It shouldn’t take that turn out here—there’s not the density of military personnel for it to be an evolutionarily selective trait.”

“But it could do pretty much anything else.”

“Yes.” The Mandrake exec looked at his hands. “I would imagine so. Once it goes active.”

“And how long have we got before that happens?”

Hand shrugged. “Until it disturbs Sutjiadi’s sentry systems. As soon as they fire on it, it starts evolving to cope.”

“And if we go blast it now? Because I know that’s going to be Sutjiadi’s vote.”

“With what? If we use the UV in the Nagini, it’ll just be ready for the sentry systems that much faster. If we use something else, it’ll evolve around that and probably go up against the sentries that much tougher and smarter. It’s nanoware. You can’t kill nanobes individually. And some always survive. Fuck, Kovacs, eighty per cent kill rate is what our labs work off as an evolutionary ideal. It’s the principle of the thing. Some survive, the toughest motherfuckers, and those are the ones that work out how to beat you next time around. Anything, anything at all you do to kick it out of the null configuration just makes things worse.”

“There must be some way to shut it down.”

“Yes, there is. All you need are the project termination codes. Which I don’t have.”

The radiation or the drugs, whatever it was, I felt suddenly tired. I stared at Hand through gritted up eyes. Nothing to say that wouldn’t be a rant along the lines of Tanya Wardani’s tirade against Sutjiadi the night before. Waste of warm air. You can’t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

Hand cleared his throat. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here before it gets very far advanced.”

“If Ghede is on our side, don’t you mean?”

He smiled. “If you like.”

“You don’t believe a word of that shit, Hand.”

The smile wiped away. “How would you know what I believe?”

“OPERNS. SUS-L. You know the acronyms. You know the construct-run results. You know this fucking programme hardware and soft. Carrera warned us about nanotech deployment, you didn’t blink. And now suddenly you’re pissed-off and scared. Something doesn’t fit.”

“That’s unfortunate.” He started to get up. “I’ve told you as much as I’m going to, Kovacs.”

I beat him to his feet and drew one of the interface guns, right-handed. It clung to my palm like something feeding.

“Sit down.”

He looked at the levelled gun—

“Don’t be ridiculou—”

—then at my face, and his voice dried up.

“Sit. Down.”

He lowered himself carefully back to the bed. “If you harm me, Kovacs, you’ve lost everything. Your money on Latimer, your passage offworld—”

“From the sound of it, I don’t look much like collecting at the moment anyway.”

“I’m backed up, Kovacs. Even if you kill me, it’s a wasted bullet. They’ll re-sleeve me in Landfall and—”

“Have you ever been shot in the stomach?”

His eyes snapped to mine. He shut up.

“These are high-impact fragmentation slugs. Close-quarters antipersonnel load. I imagine you saw what they did to Deng’s crew. They go in whole and they come out like monomol shards. I shoot you in the gut and it’ll take you the best part of a day to die. Whatever they do with your stored self, you’ll go through that here and now. I died that way once, and I’m telling you, it’s something you want to avoid.”

“I think Captain Sutjiadi might have something to say about that.”

“Sutjiadi will do what I tell him, and so will the others. You didn’t make any friends in that meeting, and they don’t want to die at the hands of your evolving nanobes any more than I do. Now suppose we finish this conversation in a civilised fashion.”

I watched him measure the will in my eyes, in my gathered stance. He’d have some diplomatic psychosense conditioning, some learned skill at gauging these things, but Envoy training has a built-in capacity to deceive that leaves most corporate bioware standing. Envoys project pure from a base of synthetic belief. At that moment, I didn’t even know myself whether I was going to shoot him or not.

He read real intent. Or something else cracked. I saw the moment cross his face. I put up the smart gun. I didn’t know which way it would have gone. You very often don’t. Being an Envoy is like that.

“This doesn’t go outside the room,” he said. “I’ll tell the others about SUS-L, but the rest we keep at this level. Anything else will be counterproductive.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”

“It would appear,” he spoke slowly, as if the words tasted bad. “That I have overextended myself. We’ve been set up.”

“By?”

“You wouldn’t know them. Competitors.”

I seated myself again. “Another corporation?”

He shook his head. “OPERNS is a Mandrake package. We bought in the SUS-L specialists freelance, but the project is Mandrake’s. Sealed up tight. These are execs inside Mandrake, jockeying for position. Colleagues.”

The last word came out like spit.

“You got a lot of colleagues like that?”

That raised a grimace. “You don’t make friends in Mandrake, Kovacs. Associates will back you as far as it pays them to. Beyond that, you’re dead in the water if you trust anyone. Comes with the territory. I’m afraid I have miscalculated.”

“So they deploy the OPERN systems in the hope you won’t come back from Dangrek. Isn’t that kind of short-sighted? In view of why we’re here, I mean?”

The Mandrake exec spread his hands. “They don’t know why we’re here. The data’s sealed in the Mandrake stack, my access only. It will have cost them every favour they own just to find out I’m down here in the first place.”

“If they’re looking to take you down here…”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I saw new reasons why he wouldn’t want to take a bullet out here. I revised my estimate of the face-down. Hand hadn’t cracked, he’d calculated.

“So how safe is your remote storage?”

“From outside Mandrake? Pretty much impregnable. From inside?” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know. We left in a hurry. The security codes are relatively old. Given time.”

He shrugged.

“Always about time, huh?”

“We could always pull back,” I offered. “Use Carrera’s incoming code to withdraw.”

Hand smiled tightly.

“Why do you think Carrera gave us that code? Experimental nanotech is locked up under Cartel protocols. In order to deploy it, my enemies would have to have influence at War Council level. That means access to the authorisation codes for the Wedge and anyone else fighting on the Cartel side. Forget Carrera. Carrera’s in their pocket. Even if it wasn’t at the time Carrera gave it out, the incoming code is just a missile tag waiting to go operative now.” The tight smile again. “And I understand the Wedge generally hit what they’re shooting at.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Generally, they do.”

“So.” Hand got up and walked to the window flap opposite his bed. “Now you know it all. Satisfied?”

I thought it through.

“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is…”

“That’s right.” He didn’t look away from the window. “A transmission detailing what we’ve found and the serial number of the claim buoy deployed to mark it as Mandrake property. Those are the only things that’ll put me back into the game at a level high enough to trump these infidels.”

I sat there for a while longer, but he seemed to have finished, so I got up to leave. He still didn’t look at me. Watching his face, I felt an unlooked-for twinge of sympathy for him. I knew what miscalculation felt like. At the exit flap, I paused.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Maybe you’d better say some prayers,” I told him. “Might make you feel better.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wardani worked herself grey.

She attacked the gate’s impassive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the assembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the scraps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.

When she was there, I stayed out of the way and watched her hunched figure through the ‘fab flap from a vantage point on the loading hatch of the Nagini. Close-focus neurachem reeled in the image and gave me her face intent over the sketchboard or the chiploader deck. When she went to the cave, I stood amidst the chaos of discarded technoglyph sketching on the floor of the bubblefab and watched her on the wall of monitors.

She wore her hair pulled severely back, but strands got out and rioted on her forehead. One usually made it down the side of her face, and left me with a feeling I couldn’t put in place.

I watched the work, and what it did to her.

Sun and Hansen watched their remote-sentry board, in shifts.

Sutjiadi watched the mouth of the cave, whether Wardani was working there or not.

The rest of the crew watched half-scrambled satellite broadcasts. Kempist propaganda channels when they could get them, for the laughs, government programming when they couldn’t. Kemp’s personal appearances drew jeers and mock shootings of the screen, Lapinee recruitment numbers drew applause and chant-alongs. Somewhere along the line, the spectrum of response got blurred into a general irony and Kemp and Lapinee started getting each other’s fanmail. Deprez and Cruickshank drew beads on Lapinee whenever she cropped up, and the whole crew had Kemp’s ideological speeches down, chanting along with full body language and demagogue gestures. Mostly, whatever was on kick-fired much-needed laughter. Even Jiang joined in with the pale flicker of a smile now and then.

Hand watched the ocean, angled south and east.

Occasionally, I tipped my head back to the splatter of starfire across the night sky, and wondered who was watching us.

Two days in, the remotes drew first blood on a nanobe colony.

I was vomiting up my breakfast when the ultravibe battery cut loose. You could feel the thrum in your bones and the pit of your stomach, which didn’t help much.

Three separate pulses. Then nothing.

I wiped my mouth clean, hit the bathroom niche’s disposal stud and went out onto the beach. The sky was nailed down grey to the horizon, only the persistent smouldering of Sauberville to mar it. No other smoke, no rinsed-out splash of fireglow to signify machine damage.

Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.

“You feel that?”

“Yeah.” I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. “Looks like we’ve engaged.”

She glanced sideways at me. “You OK?”

“Threw up. Don’t look so smug. Couple of days, you’ll be at it yourself.”

“Thanks.”

The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.

“That’s the bead,” said Cruickshank. “The first three were tracking shots. Now it’s locked on.”

“Good.”

The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal passages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.

“Do you mind?”

“Oh. Sorry.” She looked away.

I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.

Fuck.

“Where’s Sutjiadi?”

She pointed towards the Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the assault ship’s nose and Sutjiadi stood on it with Ole Hansen, apparently discussing some aspect of the vessel’s forward battery. A short distance up the beach, Ameli Vongsavath sat on a low dune and watched. Deprez, Sun and Jiang were either still at breakfast in the ship’s galley, or off doing something to kill the waiting.

Cruickshank shaded her eyes and looked at the two men on the ramp.

“I think our captain’s been looking forward to this,” she said reflectively. “He’s been rubbing up against that big bunch of guns every day since we got here. Look, he’s smiling.”

I trudged across to the ramp, riding out slow waves of nausea. Sutjiadi saw me coming and crouched down on the edge. No trace of the alleged smile.

“It seems our time has run out.”

“Not yet. Hand said it’ll take the nanobes a few days to evolve suitable responses to the ultravibe. I’d say we’re about halfway.”

“Then let’s hope your archaeologue friend is similarly advanced. Have you talked to her recently?”

“Has anybody?”

He grimaced. Wardani hadn’t been very communicative since the news about the OPERN system broke. At mealtimes, she ate for fuel and left. She shot down attempts at conversation with monosyllable fire.

“I’d appreciate a status report,” said Sutjiadi.

“On it.”

I went up the beach via Cruickshank, trading a Limon handshake she’d shown me as I passed. It was applied reflex, but it gusted a little smile across my face and the sickness in my guts receded a fraction. Something the Envoys taught me. Reflex can touch some odd, deep places.

“Talk to you?” asked Ameli Vongsavath when I reached her vantage point.

“Yeah, I’ll be back down here in a moment. Just want to check on our resident driven woman.”

It didn’t get much of a smile.

I found Wardani slumped in a lounger at one side of the cave, glowering at the gate. Playback sequences flickered on the filigree screens stretch-deployed over her head. The datacoil weaving at her side was cleared, motes of data circling forlornly at the top left corner where she had left them minimised. It was an unusual configuration—most people crush the display motes flat to the projection surface when they’re done—but either way it was the electronic equivalent of sweeping an arm across your desk and dumping the contents all over the floor. On the monitors, I’d watched her do it time and again, the exasperated gesture made somehow elegant by the reversed, upward sweep. It was something I liked watching.

“I’d rather you didn’t ask the obvious question,” she said.

“The nanobes have engaged.”

She nodded. “Yeah, felt it. What’s that give us, about three or four days?”

“Hand said four at the outside. So don’t feel like you’re under any kind of pressure here.”

That got a wan smile. Evidently I was warming up.

“Getting anywhere?”

“That’s the obvious question, Kovacs.”

“Sorry.” I found a packing case and perched on it. “Sutjiadi’s getting twitchy though. He’s looking for parameters.”

“I guess I’d better stop pissing about and just open this thing, then.”

I mustered a smile of my own. “That’d be good, yeah.”

Quiet. The gate sucked my attention.

“It’s there,” she muttered. “The wavelengths are right, the sound and vision glyphs check out. The maths works, that is, as far as I understand the maths, it works. I’ve backed up from what I know should happen, extrapolated, this is what we did last time, near as I can remember. It should fucking work. I’m missing something. Something I’ve forgotten. Maybe something I had.” Her face twitched. “Battered out of me.”

There was a hysterical snap in her voice as she shut up, an edge cutting back along the line of memories she couldn’t afford. I scrambled after it.

“If someone’s been here before us, could they have changed the settings in some way?”

She was silent for a while. I waited it out. Finally, she looked up.

“Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “Uh. For the vote of confidence. But you know, it’s kind of unlikely. Millions to one unlikely. No, I’m pretty sure I’ve just missed something.”

“But it is possible?”

“It’s possible, Kovacs. Anything’s possible. But realistically, no. No one human could have done that.”

“Humans opened it,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. Kovacs, a dog can open a door if it stands tall enough on its hind legs. But when was the last time you saw a dog take the hinges off a door and rehang it?”

“Alright.”

“There’s an order of competence here. Everything we’ve learnt to do with Martian technology—reading the astrogation charts, activating the storm shelters, riding that metro system they found on Nkrumah’s Land—these are all things any ordinary adult Martians could do in their sleep. Basic tech. Like driving a car or living in a house. This.” She gestured at the hunched spire on the other side of her battery of instruments. “This is the pinnacle of their technology. The only one we’ve found in five hundred years of scratching around on more than thirty worlds.”

“Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong places. Pawing shiny plastic packing while we tread underfoot the delicate circuitry it once protected.”

She shot me a hard look. “What are you, a Wycinski convert?”

“I did some reading in Landfall. Not easy finding copies of his later stuff, but Mandrake has a pretty eclectic set of datastacks. According to what I saw, he was pretty convinced the whole Guild search protocol is fucked.”

“He was bitter by the time he wrote that. It isn’t easy to be a certified visionary one day and a purged dissident the next.”

“He predicted the gates, didn’t he?”

“Pretty much. There were hints in some of the archive material his teams recovered at Bradbury. A couple of references to something called the Step Beyond. The Guild chose to interpret that as a lyrical poet’s take on hypercast technology. Back then we couldn’t tell what we were reading. Epic poetry or weather reports, it all looked the same and the Guild were just happy if we could squeeze some raw meaning out. The Step Beyond as a translation of hypercaster was meaning snatched from the jaws of ignorance. If it referred to some piece of technology no one had ever seen, that was no use to anybody.”

A swelling vibration spanned the cave. Dust filtered down from around the makeshift bracing. Wardani tipped a glance upward.

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, better keep an eye on that. Hansen and Sun both reckon it’ll stand reverberations a lot closer than the sentries on the inner ring, but then.” I shrugged. “Both of them have made at least one fatal mistake in the past. I’ll get a ramp in here and check the roof isn’t going to fall on you in your moment of triumph.”

“Thanks.”

I shrugged again. “In everyone’s interests, really.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh.” I gestured, suddenly feeling clumsy. “Look, you opened this thing before. You can do it again. Just a matter of time.”

“Which we don’t have.”

“Tell me,” I looked, Envoy-rapid, for some way to disrupt the spiralling gloom in her voice. “If this really is the pinnacle of Martian technology, how come your team were able to crack it in the first place? I mean…?”

I lifted my hands in appeal.

She cracked another weary smile, and I wondered suddenly how hard the radiation poisoning and the chemical counterbalance were hitting her.

“You still don’t get it, do you Kovacs? These aren’t humans we’re talking about. They didn’t think the way we do. Wycinski called it peeled-back democratic technoaccess. It’s like the storm shelters. Anyone could access them—any Martian, that is—because, well, what’s the point of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?”

“You’re right. That isn’t human.”

“It’s one of the reasons Wycinski got into trouble with the Guild in the first place. He wrote a paper on the storm shelters. The science behind the shelters is actually quite complicated, but they’d been built in such a way that it didn’t matter. The control systems were rendered back to a simplicity even we could operate. He called it a clear indication of species-wide unity, and he said it demonstrated that the concept of a Martian imperium tearing itself apart in a colonial war was just so much bullshit.”

“Just didn’t know when to shut up, huh?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So what was he arguing? A war against another race? Somebody we haven’t run up against yet?”

Wardani shrugged. “That, or they just pulled out of this region of the galaxy and went somewhere else. He never really went far down either line of reasoning. Wycinski was an iconoclast. He was more concerned with tearing down the idiocies the Guild had already perpetrated than with constructing his own theories.”

“That’s a surprisingly stupid way to behave for someone so bright.”

“Or surprisingly brave.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Wardani shook her head. “Whatever. The point is, all the technology we’ve discovered that we understand, we can work.” She gestured at the banks of equipment ranged around the gate. “We have to synthesise the light from a Martian throat gland, and the sonics we think they produced, but if we understand it, we can make it work. You asked how come we were able to crack it last time. It was designed that way. Any Martian needing to get through this gate could open it. And that means, given this equipment and enough time, we can too.”

The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.

“You going?”

“I’ve got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?”

She looked at me strangely. “Nothing else, thanks.” She straightened up a little in the lounger. “I’ve got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I’ll be down to eat.”

“Good. See you then. Oh,” I paused on my way out. “What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something.”

“Tell him I’ll have this gate open inside two days.”

“Really?”

She smiled. “No, probably not. But tell him anyway.”

Hand was busy.

The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the centre of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.

“What the fuck are you doing, Hand?”

He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.

“I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me.”

“Yeah, he told me that. Now what the fuck are you doing?”

The moment hung. I read Hand. The body language said he was yawing close to violence, which was fine by me. Dying slowly was making me twitchy and keen to do harm. Any sympathy I’d had for him a couple of days back was fast evaporating.

Maybe he read me too. He made a downward spiral motion with his left hand, and the tension in his face smoothed out. He set the bowl aside and licked the surplus blood off his thumb.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Kovacs.”

“Let me guess.” I looked around at the candles. The smell of their incense was dark and acrid. “You’re calling up a little supernatural help to get us out of this mess.”

Hand reached back and snuffed the nearest of the candles without getting up. His Mandrake mask was back in place, his voice even. “As usual, Kovacs, you approach what you do not understand with all the sensitivity of a chimpanzee troop. Suffice it to say there are rituals that must be honoured if any relationship with the spirit realm is to be fruitful.”

“I think I can grasp that, just about. You’re talking about a pay-off system. Quid pro quo. A little blood for a handful of favours. Very commercial, Hand, very corporate.”

“What do you want, Kovacs?”

“An intelligent conversation. I’ll wait outside.”

I stepped back through the flap, surprised at a slight trembling that had set in in my hands. Probably unhandled feedback from the biocircuits in my palm plates. They were as twitchy as racing dogs at the best of times, intensely hostile to any incursions on their processing integrity, and they probably weren’t handling the radiation any better than the rest of my body.

Hand’s incense sat at the back of my throat like fragments of wet cloth. I coughed it out. My temples pulsed. I grimaced and made chimpanzee noises. Scratched under my arms. Cleared my throat and coughed again. I settled into a chair in the briefing circle and examined one of my hands. Eventually, the trembling stopped.

It took the Mandrake exec about five minutes to clear away his paraphernalia and he emerged looking like a close-to-functional version of the Matthias Hand we were used to seeing around camp. There were blue smears under each eye and his skin had an underlying greyish pallor, but the distance I had seen in the eyes of other men dying of radiation sickness was not there. He had it locked down. There was only the slow seeping knowledge of imminent mortality, and that you had to look for with Envoy eyes.

“I’m hoping this is very important, Kovacs.”

“I’m hoping it’s not. Ameli Vongsavath tells me the Nagini’s onboard monitoring system shut itself down last night.”

“What?”

I nodded. “Yeah. For about five or six minutes. It isn’t difficult to do—Vongsavath says you can convince the system it’s part of a standard overhaul. So, no alarms.”

“Oh, Damballah.” He looked out at the beach. “Who else knows?”

“You do. I do. Ameli Vongsavath does. She told me, I’ve told you. Maybe you can tell Ghede, and he’ll do something about it for you.”

“Don’t start with me, Kovacs.”

“It’s time for a management decision, Hand. I figure Vongsavath has to be clean—there was no reason for her to tell me about this otherwise. I know I’m clean, and I’m guessing you are too. Outside of that, I wouldn’t like to say who else we can trust.”

“Has Vongsavath checked the ship?”

“She says, as well as she can without take-off. I was thinking more about the equipment in the hold.”

Hand closed his eyes. “Yeah. Great.”

He was picking up my speech patterns.

“From a security perspective, I’d suggest Vongsavath takes the two of us up, ostensibly for a check on our nanosized friends. She can run the system checks while we go through the manifest. Call it late this afternoon—that’s a credible gap since the remotes kicked in.”

“Alright.”

“I’d also suggest you start carrying one of these where it can’t be seen.” I showed him the compact stunner Vongsavath had given me. “Cute, isn’t it. Navy standard issue apparently, out of the Nagini’s cockpit emergency box. In case of mutiny. Minimal consequences if you fuck up and shoot the wrong guy.”

He reached for the weapon.

“Uh-uh. Get your own.” I dropped the tiny weapon back into my jacket pocket. “Talk to Vongsavath. She’s tooled up, too. Three of us ought to be enough to stop anything before it gets started.”

“Right.” He closed his eyes again, pressed thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of his eyes. “Right.”

“I know. It feels like someone really doesn’t want us to get through that gate, doesn’t it. Maybe you’re burning incense to the wrong guys.”

Outside, the ultravibe batteries cut loose again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ameli Vongsavath put us five kilometres up, flew about for a while and then kicked on the holding auto. The three of us crowded the cockpit and crouched around the flight display holo like hunter gatherers around a fire, waiting. When none of the Nagini’s systems had catastrophically failed three minutes later, Vongsavath pushed out a breath she seemed to have been holding since we stationed.

“Probably never was anything to worry about,” she said without much conviction. “Whoever’s been playing around in here isn’t likely to want to die with the rest of us, whatever else they might want to achieve.”

“That,” I said gloomily, “All depends on the level of your commitment.”

“You’re thinking Ji—”

I put a finger to my lips. “No names. Not yet. Don’t shape your thoughts ahead of time. And besides, you might want to consider that all our saboteur would really need is a little faith in their recovery team. We’d all still be stack-intact if this thing fell out of the sky, wouldn’t we.”

“Unless the fuel cells were mined, yes.”

“There you are, then.” I turned to Hand. “Shall we?”

It didn’t take long to find the damage. When Hand cracked the seal on the first high-impact shielded canister in the hold, the fumes that boiled out were enough to drive us both back up the hatch onto the crew deck. I slapped the emergency isolate panel and the hatch dropped and locked with a solid thump. I rolled onto my back on the deck, eyes streaming, hacking a cough that dug claws in the bottom of my lungs.

“Holy. Fuck.”

Ameli Vongsavath darted into view. “Are you guys—”

Hand waved her back, nodding weakly.

“Corrosion grenade,” I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. “Must have just tossed it in and locked up after. What was in this one, Ameli?”

“Give me a minute.” The pilot went back into the cockpit to run the manifest. Her voice floated back through. “Looks like medical stuff, mostly. Back-up plugins for the autosurgeon, some of the anti-radiation drugs. Both ID&A sets, one of the major trauma mobility suits. Oh, and one of the Mandrake declared ownership buoys.”

I nodded at Hand.

“Figures.” I pushed myself into a sitting position against the curve of the hull. “Ameli, can you check where the other buoys are stored. And let’s get the hold vented before we open this hatch again. I’m dying fast enough, without that shit.”

There was a drink dispenser on the wall above my head. I reached up, tugged a couple of cans free and tossed one to Hand.

“Here. Something to wash your alloy oxides down with.”

He caught the can and coughed out a laugh. I grinned back.

“So.”

“So.” He popped the can. “Whatever leakage we had back in Landfall seems to have followed us here. Or do you think someone from outside crept into the camp last night and did this?”

I thought about it. “It’s stretching credibility. With the nanoware on the prowl, a two-ring sentry system, and lethal-dose radiation blanketing the whole peninsula, they’d have to be some kind of psychotic with a mission.”

“The Kempists who got into the Tower at Landfall would fit that description. They were carrying stack burnouts, after all. Real death.”

“Hand, if I was going up against the Mandrake Corporation, I’d probably fit myself with one of those. I’m sure your counterintelligence arm have some really lovely interrogation software.”

He ignored me, following up his train of thought.

“Sneaking aboard the Nagini last night wouldn’t be a hard reprise for anyone who can crack the Mandrake Tower.”

“No, but it’s more likely we’ve got leakage in the house.”

“Alright, let’s assume that. Who? Your crew or mine?”

I tipped my head in the direction of the cockpit hatch and raised my voice.

“Ameli, you want to kick on the auto and get in here. I’d hate you to think we’re talking about you behind your back.”

There was a very brief pause, and Ameli Vongsavath appeared in the hatchway, looking slightly uncomfortable.

“Already on,” she said. “I, uh, I was listening anyway.”

“Good.” I gestured her forward. “Because logic dictates that right now you’re the only person we can really trust.”

“Thank you.”

“He said logic dictates.” Hand’s mood hadn’t improved since I hauled him out of prayers. “There are no compliments going down here, Vongsavath. You told Kovacs about the shutdown; that pretty much clears you.”

“Unless I was just covering myself for when someone opened that canister and discovered my sabotage anyway.”

I closed my eyes. “Ameli…”

“Your crew or mine, Kovacs.” The Mandrake exec was getting impatient. “Which is it?”

“My crew?” I opened my eyes and stared at the labelling on my can. I’d already run this idea through a couple of times since Vongsavath’s revelation, and I thought I had the logic sorted. “Schneider probably has the flyer skills to shut down the onboard monitors. Wardani probably doesn’t. And in either case someone would have had to come up with a better offer than.” I stopped and glanced towards the cockpit. “Than Mandrake has. That’s hard to imagine.”

“It’s been my experience that enough political belief will short-circuit material benefit as a motivation. Could either of them be Kempists?”

I thought back down the line of my association with Schneider

I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes

and Wardani

Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered… if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there

“I don’t see it, somehow.”

“Wardani was in an internment camp.”

“Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.”

Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.

“Alright, my crew,” he glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. “They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have got to them in that time.”

“Do you trust Semetaire?”

“I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.”

“I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?”

Hand rolled his eyes.

“Alright, who? Who’s your money on?”

“There is another possibility you’re not considering.”

He looked across at me. “Oh, please. Not the half-metre fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an expedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and,” I jabbed a thumb at the floor, “we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.”

Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. “Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?”

“Not that they noticed, no.” I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. “But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of… I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.”

Hand snorted. “Which does what exactly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.” I saw the way they were both looking at me. “Alright, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.”

“Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defence mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency.”

“You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?”

Hand shrugged. “Ask Kemp. He did it.”

“Alright then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that levelled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?”

“Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?” Hand looked sceptical. “After a year? Come on.”

“But what if you can’t stop it,” I said softly.

It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.

“What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioural protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.”

“Eva—” Hand saw where it was going and shut up.

“You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.”

The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.

“You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction IV,” asked Hand finally. “A behavioural virus?”

“Well it would explain the war,” said Vongsavath brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.

The tension shattered.

Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.

Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage—a faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armoury stock.

Fuck.

A third of the anti-radiation chemicals. Lost.

Back-up software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.

One functional buoy left.

Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.

Corrosion within.

“So what are you going to tell the rest?” Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.

I traded glances with Hand.

“Not a thing,” he said. “Not a fucking thing. We keep this between the three of us. Write it off to an accident.”

“Accident?” Vongsavath looked startled.

“He’s right, Ameli.” I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. “There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was powerpack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.”

Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.

Corrosion within.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.

“Are those webs?” someone asked.

Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.

“That is fast work,” said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. “But to me it looks defensive.”

“For the moment,” Hand agreed.

“Well, let’s keep it that way.” Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. “We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.”

“They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.” Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. “They’ll learn and adapt on us again.”

Cruickshank made an angry gesture. “Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?”

“That sounds like sense to me.” Sutjiadi stood up. “Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.”

Sutjiadi got what he wanted.

After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processor and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.

I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we’d found in a locker on the bridge.

“Very pretty,” said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass.

“And very crude.”

“Well, it’s a war.”

He eyed me curiously. “Strange point of view for an Envoy.”

“Ex-Envoy.”

“Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety.”

“When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.”

“Innenin.”

“Yeah, Innenin too.” I looked into the dregs of my drink.

“Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.”

“You reckon?” I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.

“For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that fuck. War. Over.”

“That’s simplistic, Deprez.” I poured refills. “He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?”

“Them too, of course.” Deprez raised his glass. “Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?”

I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. “Do I look like an accountant?”

“All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.”

“Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that either.”

“No,” said the assassin sombrely. “That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.”

“You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

He shook his head.

“I know what I am,” he said. “But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai—there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.”

I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die either.

Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.

“Well, that’s that.”

“Do you think it will work?”

I shrugged. “Like Hansen says. For a while.”

“So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons—the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?”

“Sharp sticks?”

“Are we close to opening the gate?”

“Why ask me? Wardani’s the expert.”

“You seem. Close to her.”

I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.

“Are you staying out here?”

I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.

“No reason to leave yet that I can see.”

He chuckled. “You do realise that we are drinking a collector’s item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean,” He gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be. “They aren’t going to be making any more.”

“Yeah.” I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck towards the murdered city. I poured another glass full and raised it to the sky. “So here’s to them. Let’s drink the fucking bottle.”

We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser’s handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.

At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me:

“Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?”

I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and ‘tankhead’ was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I’d been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops…

“No, of course not. Were you?”

“Of course I fucking was not. But the Envoys—”

“Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned shit that in your saner moments you’d probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that’s pretty much essential.”

“Not really.” Deprez wagged a finger. “They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn’t even have to know it hadn’t had a real upbringing. You could be something like that for all you know.”

I yawned. “Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It’s something you live with every time you get re-sleeved, every time you get DHF’d, and you know how I know they haven’t done that to me?”

“How?”

“Because there’s no way they’d programme an upbringing as fucked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some fucking clone warrior that makes me, Luc.”

He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.

“It brings you to think, though,” he said, laughter drying up.

“What does?”

He gestured around. “All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it’s all some military construct, man. Maybe it’s a place to shunt us while we’re dead, while they decide where to decant us next.”

I shrugged. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“You would be happy like that? In a construct?”

“Luc, after what I’ve seen in the last two years, I’d be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the damned.”

“Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality.”

“We differ over terms.”

“You consider yourself damned?”

I downed more Sauberville whisky and grimaced past the burn. “It was a joke, Luc. I’m being funny.”

“Ah. You should warn me.” He leaned forward suddenly. “When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?”

“If it’s not a personal question.”

“We may die on this beach. Really die.”

“Not if it’s a construct.”

“Then what if we are damned, as you say?”

“I don’t see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you.”

Deprez pulled a face. “We’ll talk about something else, then. Are you fucking the archaeologue?”

“Sixteen.”

“What?”

“Sixteen. I was sixteen. That’s closer to eighteen, earth standard. Harlan’s World orbits slower.”

“Still very young.”

I considered. “Nah, it was about time. I’d been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I’d come close a couple of times already.”

“It was a gang killing?”

“It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we’d expected. The others ran, I got caught up.” I looked at my hands. “Then I was tougher than he expected.”

“Did you take his stack?”

“No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got re-sleeved, but I’d joined up by then. He wasn’t connected enough to fuck with the military.”

“And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death.”

“I’m sure I would have got around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly fucked run-up at this stuff?”

“Oh no,” he said lightly. “It’s in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historic links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military.” He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. “You might say we were bred for it.”

“So how does covert ops sit with your historic military family history? They disappointed you didn’t end up with a command? If that’s not a personal question.”

Deprez shrugged. “Soldier’s a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains.”

“And your first?”

“On Latimer.” He smiled again, remembering. “I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose. During the Soufriere Uprising, I was part of a reconnaissance squad across the swamplands. Walked around a tree and bam!” He brought fist and cupped hand together. “There he was. I shot him before I realised it. It blasted him back ten metres and cut him in two pieces. I saw it happen and in that moment I did not understand what had happened. I did not understand that I had shot this man.”

“Did you take his stack?”

“Oh, yes. We had been instructed. Recover all fatalities for interrogation, leave no evidence.”

“That must have been fun.”

Deprez shook his head.

“I was sick,” he admitted. “Very sick. The others in my squad laughed at me, but the sergeant helped me do the cutting. He also cleaned me up and told me not to worry about it too much. Later there were others, and I, well, I became accustomed.”

“And good at it.”

He met my gaze, and the confirmation of that shared experience sparked.

“After the Soufriere campaign, I was decorated. Recommended for covert duties.”

“You ever run into the Carrefour Brotherhood?”

“Carrefour?” He frowned. “They were active in the troubles further south. Bissou and the cape—do you know it?”

I shook my head.

“Bissou was always their home ground, but who they were fighting for was a mystery. There were Carrefour hougans running guns to the rebels on the cape—I know, I killed one or two myself—but we had some working for us as well. They supplied intelligence, drugs, sometimes religious services. A lot of the rank-and-file soldiers were strong believers, so getting a hougan blessing before battle was a good thing for any commander to do. Have you had dealings with them?”

“A couple of times in Latimer City. More by reputation than actual contact. But Hand is a hougan.”

“Indeed.” Deprez looked abruptly thoughtful. “That is very interesting. He does not behave like a man of religion.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“It will make him. Less predictable.”

“Hoy. Envoy guy.” The shout came from under the port rail, and in its wake I caught the murmur of motors. “You aboard?”

“Cruickshank?” I looked up from my musing. “That you, Cruickshank?”

Laughter.

I stumbled upright and went to the rail. Peering down, I made out Schneider, Hansen and Cruickshank, all crammed onto one grav bike and hovering. They were clutching bottles and other party apparatus, and from the erratic way the bike held station, the party had started a while ago back on the beach.

“You’d better come aboard before you drown,” I said.

The new crew came with music attached. They dumped the sound system on the deck and the night lit up with Limon Highland salsa. Schneider and Hansen put together a tower pipe and powered it up at base. The smoke fumed off fragrant amidst the hung nets and masting. Cruickshank passed out cigars with the ruin-and-scaffold label of Indigo City.

“These are banned,” observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.

“Spoils of war.” Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, and hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn’t been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.

“Alright,” she said, commandeering the bottle from me. “Now we’re running interference.”

I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket, and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.

“This was a quiet party until you turned up.”

“Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?”

The cigar smoke bit. “So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?”

“Armoury supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn’t steal anything, we have an arrangement. He’s meeting me in the gun room,” she shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display. “In about an hour from now. So. Were you two old dogs comparing kills?”

I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.

“No.”

“That’s good.” She plumed smoke skyward. “I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless assholes. I mean, Samedi’s sake, it’s not like killing people is hard. We’ve all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.”

“And refining your technique, of course.”

“You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?”

I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.

“You’re from Limon, yes?” Deprez asked.

“Highlander, born and bred. Why?”

“You must have had some dealings with Carrefour then.”

Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. “Those fuckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of ‘28. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn’t work, burning villages.”

Deprez threw me a glance.

I said it. “Hand’s ex-Carrefour.”

“Doesn’t show.” She blew smoke. “Fuck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings ‘til it’s time for worship. You know for all the shit they pile on Kemp,” she hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. “At least he won’t have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City, I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.”

“Well, God,” said Deprez dryly. “You know, that’s a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp’s.”

“I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.”

I snorted.

“Hey.” Schneider pushed his way into the ring. “Come on, I heard that too. What was that Quell said? Spit on the tyrant God if the fucker tries to call you to account? Something like that?”

“Kemp’s no fucking Quellist,” said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. “Right, Kovacs?”

“It’s questionable. He borrows from it.” I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my ribcage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider’s direction. “And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.”

That caused a minor storm.

“Oh, come on—”

“What?”

“It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi’s sake.”

“Schneider, she never died.”

“Now there,” said Deprez ironically, “is an article of faith.”

Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.

“Alright, she never died that we know of. She just disappeared. But you don’t get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.”

“Maybe it was a valediction.”

“Maybe it was bullshit.” I stood up, unsteadily. “You want the quote, I’ll give you the quote.”

“Yeahhh!!!”

“Bright!!”

They scooted back to give me room.

I cleared my throat. “ ‘I have no excuses,’ she said. This is from the Campaign Diaries, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, fucked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan’s World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. That’s exactly what she said.”

Applause, like startled birds across the deck.

I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.

“Give us a poem,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” jeered Schneider. “A war poem.”

Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok and Munharto, gathered round, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.

Where were my excuses?

“I never learnt her poetry,” I lied, and walked away along the ship’s rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it was clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.

“Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.” It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. “No joke if you’re from the H World, huh?”

“It isn’t that.”

“No?”

“Nah. She was a fucking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death single-handed than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.”

“Impressive.”

I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself smiling. I shook my head. “Oh, Cruickshank, Cruickshank.”

“What?”

“You’re going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you’re standing on my side of the interface.”

“Yeah, right, old man.”

I shook my head again, but couldn’t seem to shake the grin loose. “Suit yourself.”

“Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.”

“Gosh, almost a whole decade.”

“I’m twenty-two, Kovacs.” She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black and starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn’t match the smile. “Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That’s out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal’s flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.”

“Dead at twenty-two.” It came out harsher than I’d meant.

Cruickshank drew a slow breath. “Man, you are in a shitty mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I’m back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I’m a big girl, Kovacs, so how ‘bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.”

I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realisation that she was right than anything else.

“Whatever you say. Big girl.”

“Yeah, I saw you looking.” She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out towards the beach. “So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?”

Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.

“I don’t know, Cruickshank. I’m not convinced this is the time and place.”

“Gate got you spooked, huh?”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

She waved it away. “Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?”

“Well, she did before, by all accounts.”

“Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.”

“Well, I guess that’s military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it some time.”

“Back off, Kovacs.” There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. “We don’t work the camps, man. That’s government levy. Strictly home-grown.”

Riding the updraft. “Cruickshank, you don’t know a fucking thing.”

She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.

“Well, uh, I know what they say about Carrera’s Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy, by all accounts. So maybe you want to make sure you’re clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?”

She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.

“Sorry.”

“Skip it.” But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.

“No, really. I’m sorry. This place is killing me.”

An unwilling smile curled her lip.

“I mean it. I’ve been killed before, more times than you’d believe,” I shook my head. “It’s just, it never took this long before.”

“Yeah. Plus you’re abseiling after the archaeologue, right?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is now.” She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. “I don’t blame you. She’s smart, she’s got her head wrapped around stuff that’s just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.”

She looked around.

“Surprise you, huh?”

“A little.”

“Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we’ve got back there, it’s going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Yeah.” She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. “I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.”

She looked at me.

“Feels weird, you know. It’s like, I died. And now I’ve come back, and I have to face this moment. I don’t know if it should scare me. But it doesn’t. Man, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.”

There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.

She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.

“See you there, Kovacs,” she murmured.

I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.

Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?

Extenuating circumstances. I’m dying.

You’re all, dying, Kovacs. All of you.

The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we’d hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.

Chemicals.

That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that fucking wolf splice again. Don’t forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.

No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.

I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—

Fuck off.

I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned and walked rapidly to the main companion way.

“Hoy, Kovacs?” It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. “Where you going, man?”

“Call of nature,” I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half metre at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem and lurched into the narrow space behind.

IIluminum tiles with badly-fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, moulded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes; and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.

Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see how the new harvest begins?

Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.

You are mistaken. I am no charlatan, and Semetaire is only one of a hundred names…

Whoever you are, you’re looking for an antipersonnel round in the face.

But you brought me here.

I don’t think so.

I saw a skull, lolling at a rakish angle in the nets. Sardonic amusement grinning from blackened, eaten-back lips.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but I am finished there now. And there is work for me here.

Now you’re mistaken. When I want you, I’ll come looking for you.

Kovacs-vacs-vacs-vacs-vacs…

I blinked. The datadisplay ripped light across my open eyes. Someone moved behind me.

I straightened up and stared into the bulkhead above the desk. The dull metal threw back blue from the display. Light caught on a thousand tiny dents and abrasions.

The presence behind me shifted—

I drew breath.

—Closer—

And spun, murderous.

“Shit, Kovacs, you want to give me a heart attack?”

Cruickshank was a step away, hands on her hips. The datadisplay glow picked out the uncertain grin on her face and the unseamed shirt beneath her chameleochrome jacket.

The breath gusted out of me. My adrenalin surge collapsed.

“Cruickshank, what the fuck are you doing down here?”

“Kovacs, what the fuck are you doing here? You said a call of nature. What are you planning to do, piss on the datacoil there?”

“What did you follow me down here for?” I hissed. “You going to hold it for me?”

“I don’t know. That what you like, Kovacs? You a digital man? That your thing?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Semetaire was gone, but the thing in my chest was still coiling languidly through me. I opened my eyes again, and she was still there.

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

She grinned. One hand brushed with apparent casualness at the unseamed opening of her shirt, thumb hooking in and slipping the fabric back to reveal the breast beneath. She looked down at her own recently acquired flesh as if entranced by it. Then she brought her fingers back to brush the nipple, flicking back and forth at it until it had stiffened.

“I look like I’m only looking, Envoy guy?” she asked lazily.

She looked up at me and it got pretty frantic after that. We closed and her thigh slid between mine, warm and hard through the soft cloth of the coveralls. I pushed her hand away from her breast and replaced it with my own. The closure became a clinch, both of us looking down at the exposed nipple squeezed between us, and what my fingers were doing to it. I could hear her breath starting to scrape as her own hand unclasped my waistband and slid inside. She cupped the end of my cock and kneaded at it with thumb and palm.

We fell sideways onto the bedshelf in a tangle of clothing and limbs. A salt damp and mustiness rose almost visibly around us on impact. Cruickshank threw out one booted foot and kicked the cabin door closed. It shut with a clang that must have been heard all the way back up to the party on deck. I grinned into Cruickshank’s hair.

“Poor old Jan.”

“Huh?” She turned from what she was doing to my prick for a moment.

“I think, ahhhh, I think this is going to piss him off. He’s been drifting after you since we left Landfall.”

“Listen, with legs like these, anyone with a male heterosex gene code is going to be drifting after me. I wouldn’t,” she started to stroke, paced a pair of seconds apart. “Read. Anything. Into it.”

I drew breath. “OK, I won’t.”

“Good. Anyway,” she lowered one breast towards the head of my prick and began to rub slow circles around the nipple with my glans. “He’s probably got his hands full with the archaeologue.”

“What?”

I tried to sit up. Cruickshank pushed me back down absently, most of her still focused on the rubbing friction of glans on breast.

“Nah, you just stay there till I’m finished with you. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but seeing as,” she gestured at what she was doing. “Well, I guess you can deal with it. Seen the two of them sloping off together a couple of times now. And Schneider always comes back with this big shit-eating grin, so I figure, you know.” She shrugged, and went back to the timed strokes. “Well, he’s not a. Bad looking. Guy for a Whiteboy and Wardani, well. She’d probably. Take whatever. She can get. You liking this, Kovacs?”

I groaned.

“Thought so. You guys.” She shook her head. “Standard porn-construct stuff. Never fails.”

“You come here, Cruickshank.”

“Ah-ah. No way. Later. I want to see your face when you want to come and I don’t let you.”

She had working against her the alcohol and the pipe, impending radiation poisoning, Semetaire rustling around in the back of my head and now the thought of Tanya Wardani in Schneider’s embrace—still Cruickshank had me there in less than ten minutes with the combination of hard strokes and soft brushstrokes across her breasts. And when she got me there, she pulled me back from the brink three times with pleased, excited sounds in her throat, before finally masturbating me rapidly and violently to a climax that spattered us both with semen.

The release was like something being unplugged in my head.

Wardani and Schneider, Semetaire and impending death all went with it, blown out of my skull through my eyes with the force of the orgasm. I went limp in the narrow bed-space and the cabin beyond spun away into distant irrelevance.

When I felt something again, it was the smooth brush of Cruickshank’s thigh as she swung herself astride my chest and seated herself there.

“Now, Envoy guy,” she said, reaching down for my head with both hands. “Let’s see you pay that off.”

Her fingers laced across the back of my head and she held me to the budding folds of flesh like a nursing mother, rocking gently. Her cunt was hot and wet on my mouth and the juices that pooled and slipped out of her tasted of bitter spice. There was a scent to her like delicately burnt wood and a sound in the back of her throat like a saw blade rubbing back and forth. I could feel the tension welling up in the long muscles of her thighs as her climax built, and towards the end she lifted fractionally from her seat on my chest and began tilting her pelvis back and forth in a blind echo of coitus. The cage of fingers nursing my head between her thighs made tiny flexing motions, as if she was losing her grip on the last handhold over an abyss. The noise in her throat became a tight and urgent panting, sawing towards a hoarse cry.

You don’t lose me that easily, Wedge Wolf

Cruickshank rose on her haunches, muscles locked up rigid, and yelled her orgasm into the damp air of the cabin.

Not that easily

She shuddered and sank back, crushing the air out of me. Her fingers let go and my head dropped back to the clammy sheets.

I am locked in and

“Now,” she said, reaching back along my body. “Let’s see what we… Oh.”

You couldn’t miss the surprise in her voice, but she hid the attendant disappointment well. I was semi-erect in her hand, an unreliable hard-on bleeding back to the muscles my body thought it needed to fight or run from the thing in my head.

Yes. Do you see how the new harvest begins. You can run, but—

Get the FUCK out of my head.

I propped myself up on my elbows, feeling the shutdown settling over my face in tight masking bands. The fire we’d lit in the cabin was guttering out. I tried for a smile and felt Semetaire take it away from me.

“Sorry about that. I guess. This dying thing’s getting to me sooner than I thought.”

She shrugged. “Hey, Kovacs. The words just physical were never truer than right here and now. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”

I winced.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” It was the same comically crestfallen expression I’d seen on her face in the construct interview. Somehow, on the Maori sleeve it was funnier still. I chuckled, grabbed at the glimmer of laughter offered. Grabbed and grinned harder.

“Ahhh,” she said, feeling the change. “Want to try anyway? Won’t take much, I’m all wet inside.”

She slid back and arched over me. In the faint glow from the datacoil, I fixed my gaze on the juncture of her thighs with a kind of desperation and she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.

The heat and pressure and the long, tensed body riding me were the fragments I used to keep going, but it still wasn’t what you’d call great sex. I slipped free a couple of times and my problems became hers as the obvious lack of abandonment braked her excitement back to not much more than methodical technical expertise and a determination to get this done.

Do you see how—

I flailed down the voice in the back of my head and brought some determination of my own to match that of the woman I was joined to. For a while it was work, attention to posture and tight smiles. Then I pushed a thumb into her mouth, let her moisten it and used it to find her clitoris in the crux of her spread legs. She took my other hand and pressed it onto her breast, and not long after she found an orgasm of sorts.

I didn’t, but in the grinning, sweat-soaked kiss we shared after she had come, that didn’t seem to matter so much.

It wasn’t great sex, but it slammed the door on Semetaire for a while. And later, when Cruickshank pulled her clothes back together and went back up on deck, to cheers and applause from the rest of the party, I stayed in the gloom waiting for him, and he still chose not to show.

It was the closest thing to a victory that I ever enjoyed on Sanction IV.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Consciousness hit me in the head like a freak fighter’s claw.

I flinched from the impact and rolled over in the bedshelf, trying to crawl back into sleep, but the movement brought with it a rolling wave of nausea. I stopped the vomit in its tracks with an effort of will and propped myself up on one elbow, blinking. Daylight was boring a blurry hole through the gloom above my head from a porthole I hadn’t noticed the night before. At the other end of the cabin, the datacoil wove its tireless spiral from the emanator on the desk to the shelved systems data in the top left-hand corner. Voices came through the bulkhead behind me.

Check functionality. I heard Virginia Vidaura’s admonitions from the Envoy training modules. It’s not injury you’re concerned with, it’s damage. Pain you can either use or shut down. Wounds matter only if they cause structural impairment. Don’t worry about the blood; it isn’t yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don’t worry about wounds; check your functionality.

My head felt as if someone was sawing it in half from the inside. Waves of feverish sweat spread down through me, apparently from a point on the back of my scalp. The floor of my stomach had climbed and was nestling somewhere at the base of my throat. My lungs hurt in an obscure, misted way. It felt as if I’d been shot with the stunner in my jacket pocket, on a not particularly low beam.

Functionality!

Thanks Virginia.

Hard to tell how much of this was hangover and how much was dying. Hard to care. I worked myself cautiously into a sitting position on the edge of the shelf and noticed for the first time that I’d fallen asleep more or less in my clothes. I searched my pockets, turned up the battlefield medic’s gun and the anti-radiation capsules. I weighed the transparent plastic tubes in one hand and thought about it. The shock of injection was very likely going to make me vomit.

A deeper trawl through my pockets finally turned up a stick of military-issue painkillers. I snapped one loose, held it between finger and thumb and looked at it for a moment, then added a second. Conditioned reflex took the controls as I checked the delivery muzzle of the medic’s gun, cleared the breech and loaded the two crystal-filled capsules nose to tail. I snapped the slide and the gun made a high-pitched scaling whine as the magnetic field charged.

My head twinged. An excruciating hard-under-soft sensation that made me, for some reason, think of the flecks of systems data floating in the corner of the coil at the other end of the room.

The charged light winked redly at me from the gun. Inside the breech, inside the capsules, the military-format crystal shards would be aliped, sharp-edged ends pointing down the barrel like a million poised daggers. I pushed the muzzle against the crook of my elbow and squeezed the trigger.

The relief was instant. A soft red rush through my head, wiping the pain away in smudges of pink and grey. Wedge issue. Nothing but the very best for Carrera’s wolves. I smirked to myself, stoned on the endorphin boost, and groped for the anti-radiation capsules.

Feeling pretty fucking functional now, Virginia.

Dumped out the shredded painkiller caps. Reloaded with anti-rad, snapped the slide.

Look at yourself, Kovacs. A dying, disintegrating set of cells, woven back together with chemical thread.

That didn’t sound like Virginia Vidaura, so it might have been Semetaire, creeping back from last night’s retreat. I pushed the observation to the back of my mind and focused on function.

You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon…

Yeah, yeah.

Waited out the rising whine. Waited for the red-eyed wink.

Shot.

Pretty fucking functional.

Clothing arranged in something approaching fastened order, I followed the sound of the voices to the galley. Everyone from the party was gathered there, with the notable exception of Schneider, and breakfast was in progress. I got a brief round of applause as I made my appearance. Cruickshank grinned, bumped hips with me and handed me a mug of coffee. By the look of her pupils, I wasn’t the only one who’d been at the mil-issue medicine pack.

“What time did you guys wind up?” I asked, seating myself.

Ole Hansen consulted his retinal display, “ ‘bout an hour ago. Luc here offered to cook. I went back to the camp for the stuff.”

“What about Schneider?”

Hansen shrugged and forked food into his mouth. “Went with, but then he stayed. Why?”

“No reason.”

“Here.” Luc Deprez slid an omelette-laden plate in front of me. “Refuel.”

I tried a couple of mouthfuls, but couldn’t develop any enthusiasm for it. I wasn’t feeling any definable pain, but there was a sickly instability underlying the numbness that I knew had set in at a cellular level. I hadn’t had any real appetite for the last couple of days, and it had been getting increasingly hard to hold food down early in the morning. I cut up the omelette and pushed the pieces around the plate, but in the end I left most of it.

Deprez pretended not to notice, but you could tell he was hurt.

“Anyone notice if our tiny friends are still burning?”

“There’s smoke,” said Hansen. “But not much of it. You not going to eat that?”

I shook my head.

“Give it here.” He grabbed my plate and scraped it onto his own. “You really must have overdone the local hooch last night.”

“I’m dying, Ole,” I said irritably.

“Yeah, maybe it’s that. Or the pipe. My father told me once, never mix alcohol and whiff. Fucks you up.”

A comset chime sounded from the other end of the table. Someone’s discarded induction rig left on broadcast. Hansen grunted, and reached for the set with his free hand. He held it to his ear.

“Hansen. Yeah.” He listened. “Alright. Five minutes.” He listened again, and a thin smile appeared on his face. “Right, I’ll tell them. Ten minutes. Yeah.”

He tossed the set back among the plates and grimaced.

“Sutjiadi?”

“Got it in one. Going to fly a recon over the nanocolonies. Oh yeah.” His grin came back. “And the man says don’t turn off your fucking rigs if you don’t want to log a fucking disciplinary.”

Deprez chuckled. “Is that a fucking quote?”

“No. Fucking paraphrase.” Hansen tossed his fork across his plate and stood up. “He didn’t say disciplinary, he called it a DP9.”

Running a platoon is a tricky job at the best of times. When your crew are all way-past-lethal spec ops primadonnas who’ve been killed at least once, it must be a nightmare.

Sutjiadi wore it well.

He watched without expression as we filed into the briefing room and found seats. The memoryboard on each seat had been set with a foil of edible painkillers, bent and stood on end. Someone whooped above the general murmur when they saw the drugs, then quietened down as Sutjiadi looked in their direction. When he spoke, his voice could have belonged to a restaurant mandroid recommending wine.

“Anyone here who still has a hangover had better deal with it now. One of the outer-ring sentry systems is down. There’s no indication of how.”

It got the desired reaction. The murmur of conversation damped out. I felt my own endorphin high dip.

“Cruickshank and Hansen, I want you to take one of the bikes and go check it out. Any sign of activity, any activity at all, you veer off and get straight back here. Otherwise, I want you to recover any wreckage on site and bring it back for analysis. Vongsavath, I want the Nagini powered up and ready to lift at my command. Everybody else, arm yourselves and stay where you can be found. And wear your rigs at all times.” He turned to Tanya Wardani, who was slumped in a chair at the back of the room, wrapped in her coat and masked with sunlenses. “Mistress Wardani. Any chance of an estimated opening time.”

“Maybe tomorrow.” She gave no sign that she was even looking at him behind the lenses. “With luck.”

Someone snorted. Sutjiadi didn’t bother to track it.

“I don’t need to remind you, Mistress Wardani, that we are under threat.”

“No. You don’t.” She unfolded herself from the chair and drifted for the exit. “I’ll be in the cave.”

The meeting broke up in her wake.

Hansen and Cruickshank were gone less than half an hour.

“Nothing,” the demolitions specialist told Sutjiadi when they got back. “No debris, no scorching, no signs of machine damage. In fact,” he looked back over his shoulder, back to where they’d searched. “No sign the fucking thing was ever there in the first place.”

The tension in the camp notched higher. Most of the spec ops team, true to their individual callings, retreated into moody quiet and semi-obsessive examinations of the weapons they were skilled with. Hansen unpacked the corrosion grenades and studied their fuses. Cruickshank stripped down the mobile artillery systems. Sutjiadi and Vongsavath disappeared into the cockpit of the Nagini, followed after a brief hesitation by Schneider. Luc Deprez sparred seriously with Jiang Jiang-ping down by the waterline, and Hand retreated into his bubblefab, presumably to burn some more incense.

I spent the rest of the morning seated on a rock ledge above the beach with Sun Liping, hoping the residues from the night before would work their way out of my system before the painkillers did. The sky over us had the look of better weather. The previous day’s nailed-down grey had broken apart on reefs of blue arrowing in from the west. Eastward, the smoke from Sauberville bent away with the evacuating cloud cover. Vague awareness of the hangover that waited beyond the curtain of endorphins lent the whole scene an undeservedly mellow tone.

The smoke from the nanocolonies that Hansen had seen was gone altogether. When I mentioned the fact to Sun, she just shrugged. I wasn’t the only one feeling irrationally mellow, it seemed.

“Any of this worry you at all?” I asked her.

“This situation?” she appeared to think about it. “I’ve been in more danger, I think.”

“Of course you have. You’ve been dead.”

“Well, yes. But that wasn’t what I meant. The nanosystems are a concern, but even if Matthias Hand’s fears are well founded, I don’t imagine they will evolve anything capable of pulling the Nagini out of the sky.”

I thought about the grasshopper robot guns Hand had mentioned. It was one of many details he had chosen not to pass on to the rest of the team when he briefed them on the OPERN system.

“Do your family know what you do for a living?”

Sun looked surprised. “Yes, of course. My father recommended the military. It was a good way of getting my systems training paid for. They always have money, he told me. Decide what you want to do, and then get them to pay you to do it. Of course, it never occurred to him that there’d be a war here. Who would have thought it, twenty years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“And yours?”

“My what? My father? Don’t know, haven’t seen him since I was eight. Nearly forty years ago, subjective time. More than a century and a half, objective.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. My life got radically better when he left.”

“Don’t you think he’d be proud of you now?”

I laughed. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He was always a big fan of violence, my old man. Season ticket holder to the freak fights. ‘Course, he had no formal training himself, so he always had to make do with defenceless women and children.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, yeah. He’d be proud of what I’ve done with my life.”

Sun was quiet for a moment.

“And your mother?”

I looked away, trying to remember. The downside of Envoy total recall is that memories of everything before the conditioning tend to seem blurry and incomplete by comparison. You accelerate away from it all, like lift-off, like launch. It was an effect I’d craved at the time. Now, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember.

“I think she was pleased when I enlisted,” I said slowly. “When I came home in the uniform, she had a tea ceremony for me. Invited everyone on the block. I guess she was proud of me. And the money must have helped. There were three of us to feed—me and two younger sisters. She did what she could after my father left, but we were always broke. When I finished basic, it must have tripled our income. On Harlan’s World, the Protectorate pays its soldiers pretty well—it has to, to compete with the yakuza and the Quellists.”

“Does she know you are here?”

I shook my head.

“I was away too much. In the Envoys, they deploy you everywhere except your home world. There’s less danger of you developing some inconvenient empathy with the people you’re supposed to be killing.”

“Yes.” Sun nodded. “A standard precaution. It makes sense. But you are no longer an Envoy. Did you not return home?”

I grinned mirthlessly.

“Yeah, as a career criminal. When you leave the Envoys, there isn’t much else on offer. And by that time my mother was married to another man, a Protectorate recruiting officer. Family reunion seemed. Well, inappropriate.”

Sun said nothing for a while. She seemed to be watching the beach below us, waiting for something.

“Peaceful here, isn’t it,” I said, for something to say.

“At a certain level of perception.” She nodded. “Not, of course, at a cellular level. There is a pitched battle being fought there, and we are losing.”

“That’s right, cheer me up.”

A smile flitted across her face. “Sorry. But it’s hard to think in terms of peace when you have a murdered city on one hand, the pent-up force of a hyperportal on the other, a closing army of nanocreatures somewhere just over the hill and the air awash with lethal-dose radiation.”

“Well, now that you put it like that…”

The smile came back. “It’s my training, Kovacs. I spend my time interacting with machines at levels my normal senses can’t perceive. When you do that for a living, you start to see the storm beneath the calm everywhere. Look out there. You see a tideless ocean, sunlight falling on calm water. It’s peaceful, yes. But under the surface of the water, there are millions of creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle to feed themselves. Look, most of the gull corpses are gone already.” She grimaced. “Remind me not to go swimming. Even the sunlight is a solid fusillade of subatomic particles, blasting apart anything that hasn’t evolved the appropriate levels of protection, which of course every living thing around here has because its distant ancestors died in their millions so that a handful of survivors could develop the necessary mutational traits.”

“All peace is an illusion, huh? Sounds like something a Renouncer monk would say.”

“Not an illusion, no. But it is relative, and all of it, all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.”

“That’s what keeps you in the military, is it?”

“My contract is what keeps me in the military. I have another ten years to serve, minimum. And if I’m honest,” she shrugged. “I’ll probably stay on after that. The war will be over by then.”

“Always more wars.”

“Not on Sanction IV. Once they’ve crushed Kemp, there’ll be a clampdown. Strictly police actions from then on. They’ll never let it get out of hand like this again.”

I thought about Hand’s exultation at the no-holds-barred licensing protocols Mandrake were currently running on, and I wondered.

Aloud, I said, “A police action can get you killed just as dead as a war.”

“I’ve been dead. And now look at me. It wasn’t so bad.”

“Alright, Sun.” I felt a wavefront of new weariness wash through me, turning my stomach and hurting my eyes. “I give up. You’re one tough motherfucker. You should be telling this stuff to Cruickshank. She’d eat it up.”

“I do not think Yvette Cruickshank needs any encouragement. She is young enough to be enjoying this for itself.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“And if I appear a tough motherfucker to you, it was not my intention. But I am a career soldier, and it would be foolish to build resentment against that choice. It was a choice. I was not conscripted.”

“Yeah, well these days that’s…” The edge ebbed out of my voice as I saw Schneider drop from the forward hatch of the Nagini and sprint up the beach. “Where’s he going?”

Below us, from under the angle of the ledge we were seated on, Tanya Wardani emerged. She was walking roughly seaward, but there was something odd about her gait. Her coat seemed to shimmer blue down one side in granular patches that looked vaguely familiar.

I got to my feet. Racked up the neurachem.

Sun laid a hand on my arm. “Is she—”

It was sand. Patches of damp turquoise sand from the inside of the cavern. Sand that must have clung when—

She crumpled.

It was a graceless fall. Her left leg gave out as she put it down and she pivoted round and downwards around the buckling limb. I was already in motion, leaping down from the ledge in a series of neurachem-mapped footholds, each one good only for momentary bracing and then on to the next before I could slip. I landed in the sand about the same time Wardani completed her fall and was at her side a couple of seconds before Schneider.

“I saw her fall when she came out of the cave,” he blurted as he reached me.

“Let’s get her—”

“I’m fine.” Wardani turned over and shook off my arm. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked from Schneider to me and back. I saw, abruptly, how haggard she had become. “Both of you, I’m fine. Thanks.”

“So what’s going on?” I asked her quietly.

“What’s going on?” She coughed and spat in the sand, phlegm streaked with blood. “I’m dying, just like everyone else in this neighbourhood. That’s what’s going on.”

“Maybe you’d better not do any more work today,” said Schneider hesitantly. “Maybe you should rest.”

She shot him a quizzical look, then turned her attention to getting up.

“Oh, yeah.” She heaved herself upright and grinned. “Forgot to say. I opened the gate. Cracked it.”

I saw blood in the grin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I don’t see anything,” said Sutjiadi.

Wardani sighed and walked to one of her consoles. She hit a sequence of screen panels and one of the stretch-filigrees eased down until it stood between us and the apparently impenetrable spike of Martian technology in the centre of the cavern. Another screen switch and lamps seated in the corners of the cavern went incandescent with blue.

“There.”

Through the stretchscreen, everything was bathed in cool violet light. In the new colour scheme, the upper edges of the gate flickered and ran with gobs of brilliance that slashed through the surrounding glow like revolving biohazard cherries.

“What is that?” asked Cruickshank at my back.

“It’s a countdown,” said Schneider with dismissive familiarity. He’d seen this before. “Right, Tanya.”

Wardani smiled weakly and leaned on the console.

“We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do. A lot of their visual notation seems to refer to bands in the ultraviolet range.” She cleared her throat. “They’d be able to see this unaided. And what it’s saying, more or less, is: stand clear.”

I watched, fascinated. Each blob seemed to ignite at the peak of the spire and then separate and drip rapidly along the leading edges to the base. At intervals along the drip down, the lights fired bursts off themselves into the folding that filled the splits between the edges. It was hard to tell, but if you tracked the trajectory of these offbursts, they seemed to be travelling a long way into the cramped geometry of each crack, a longer distance than they had any right to in three-dimensional space.

“Some of it becomes visual later,” said Wardani. “The frequency scales down as we get nearer to the event. Not sure why.”

Sutjiadi turned aside. In the splashes of rendered light through the filigree screen, he looked unhappy.

“How long?” he asked.

Wardani lifted an arm and pointed along the console to the scrambling digits of a countdown display. “About six hours, standard. A little less now.”

“Samedi’s sake, that is beautiful.” breathed Cruickshank. She stood at my shoulder and stared entranced at the screened spike and what was happening to it. The light passing over her face seemed to have washed her features of every emotion but wonder.

“We’d better get that buoy up here, captain.” Hand was peering into the explosions of radiance with an expression I hadn’t seen since I surprised him at worship. “And the launching frame. We’ll need to fire it across.”

Sutjiadi turned his back on the gate. “Cruickshank. Cruickshank!”

“Sir.” The Limon woman blinked and looked at him, but her eyes kept tugging back towards the screen.

“Get back down to the Nagini and help Hansen prep the buoy for firing. And tell Vongsavath to get a launch and landing mapped for tonight. See if she can’t break through some of this jamming and transmit to the Wedge at Masson. Tell them we’re coming out.” He looked across at me. “I’d hate to get shot down by friendly fire at this stage.”

I glanced at Hand, curious to see how he’d handle this one.

I needn’t have worried.

“No transmissions just yet, captain.” The executive’s voice was a study in absent detachment—you would have sworn he was absorbed in the gate countdown—but under the casual tone there was the unmistakable tensile strength of an order given. “Let’s keep this on a need-to-know basis until we’re actually ready to go home. Just get Vongsavath to map the parabola.”

Sutjiadi wasn’t stupid. He heard the cabling buried in Hand’s voice and shot me another look, questioning.

I shrugged, and weighed in on the side of Hand’s deception. What are Envoys for, after all?

“Look at it this way, Sutjiadi. If they knew you were on board, they’d probably shoot us down anyway, just to get to you.”

“Carrera’s Wedge,” said Hand stiffly, “will do no such thing while they are under contract to the Cartel.”

“Don’t you mean the government?” jeered Schneider. “I thought this war was an internal matter, Hand.”

Hand shot him a weary look.

“Vongsavath.” Sutjiadi had chinned his mike to the general channel. “You there?”

“In place.”

“And the rest of you?”

Four more voices thrummed in the induction mike at my ear. Hansen and Jiang taut with alertness, Deprez laconic and Sun somewhere in between.

“Map a launch and landing. Here to Landfall. We expect to be out of here in another seven hours.”

A round of cheers rang through the induction mike at my ear.

“Try to get some idea of what the suborbital traffic’s like along the curve, but maintain transmission silence until we lift. Is that clear?”

“Silent running,” said Vongsavath. “Got it.”

“Good.” Sutjiadi nodded at Cruickshank, and the Limon woman loped out of the cavern. “Hansen, Cruickshank’s coming down to help prep the claim buoy. That’s all. The rest of you, stay sharp.” Sutjiadi unlocked his posture slightly and turned to face the archaeologue. “Mistress Wardani, you look ill. Is there anything remaining for you to do here?”

“I—” Wardani sagged visibly over the console. “No, I’m done. Until you want the damned thing closed again.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Hand called out from where he stood to one side of the gate, looking up at it with a distinctly proprietorial air. “With the buoy established, we can notify the Cartel and bring in a full team. With Wedge support, I imagine we can render this a ceasefire zone”—he smiled—“rather rapidly.”

“Try telling that to Kemp,” said Schneider.

“Oh, we will.”

“In any case, Mistress Wardani.” Sutjiadi’s tone was impatient. “I suggest you return to the Nagini as well. Ask Cruickshank to jack her field medic programme and look you over.”

“Well, thanks.”

“I beg your pardon.”

Wardani shook her head and propped herself upright. “I thought one of us should say it.”

She left without a backward glance. Schneider looked at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, went after her.

“You’ve got a way with civilians, Sutjiadi. Anyone ever tell you that?”

He stared at me impassively. “Is there some reason for you to stay?”

“I like the view.”

He made a noise in his throat and looked back at the gate. You could tell he didn’t like doing it, and with Cruickshank gone, he was letting the feeling leak out. There was a gathered stiffness about his stance as soon as he faced the device, something akin to the tension you see in bad fighters before a bout.

I put up a flat hand in clear view, and after a proper pause I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Don’t tell me this thing scares you, Sutjiadi. Not the man who faced down Dog Veutin and his whole squad. You were my hero for a while, back there.”

If he thought it was funny, he kept it to himself.

“Come on, it’s a machine. Like a crane, like a…” I groped about for appropriate comparisons. “Like a machine. That’s all it is. We’ll be building these ourselves in a few centuries. Take out the right sleeve insurance, you might even live to see it.”

“You’re wrong,” he said distantly. “This isn’t like anything human.”

“Oh shit, you’re not going to get mystical on me, are you?” I glanced across to where Hand stood, suddenly feeling unfairly ganged-up on. “Of course it isn’t like anything human. Humans didn’t build it, the Martians did. But they’re just another race. Smarter than us maybe, further ahead than us maybe, but that doesn’t make them gods or demons, does it? Does it?”

He turned to face me. “I don’t know. Does it?”

“Sutjiadi, I swear you’re beginning to sound like that moron over there. This is technology you’re looking at.”

“No.” He shook his head. “This is a threshold we’re about to step over. And we’re going to regret it. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the. The waiting in it?”

“No, but I can feel the waiting in me. If this thing creeps you out so much, can we go and do something constructive.”

“That would be good.”

Hand seemed content to stay and gloat over his new toy, so we left him there and made our way back along the tunnel. Sutjiadi’s jitters must have sparked across to me somehow though, because as the first twist took us out of sight of the activated gate, I had to admit that I felt something on the back of my neck. It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind.

At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within.

I shook the thought loose irritably.

“You happy now?” I enquired acidly, as we stepped out into the light.

“I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get you, Sutjiadi. Landfall’s built within sniper fire of six major digs. This whole planet is riddled with Martian ruins.”

“I’m from Latimer, originally. I go where they tell me.”

“Alright, Latimer. They’re not short on ruins either. Jesus, every fucking world we’ve colonised belonged to them once. We’ve got their charts to thank for being out here in the first place.”

“Exactly.” Sutjiadi stopped dead and swung on me with the closest thing I’d seen to true emotion on his face since he’d lost the tussle over blasting the rockfall away from the gate. “Exactly. And you want to know what that means?”

I leaned back, surprised by the sudden intensity. “Yeah, sure. Tell me.”

“It means we shouldn’t be out here, Kovacs.” He was speaking in a low, urgent voice I hadn’t heard him use before. “We don’t belong here. We’re not ready. It’s a stupid fucking mistake that we stumbled onto the astrogation charts in the first place. Under our own steam, it would have taken us thousands of years to find these planets and colonise them. We needed that time, Kovacs. We needed to earn our place in interstellar space. Instead we got out here bootstrapping ourselves on a dead civilisation we don’t understand.”

“I don’t think—”

He trampled the objection down. “Look at how long it’s taken the archaeologue to open that gate. Look at all the half-understood scraps we’ve depended on to come this far. We’re pretty sure the Martians saw farther into blue than we do.” He mimicked Wardani savagely. “She’s got no idea, and neither does anyone else. We’re guessing. We have no idea what we’re doing, Kovacs. We wander around out here, nailing our little anthropomorphic certainties to the cosmos and whistling in the dark, but the truth is we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing. We shouldn’t be out here at all. We do not belong here.”

I pushed out a long breath.

“Well. Sutjiadi.” I looked at ground and sky in turn. “You’d better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a shithole, of course, but it’s where we’re from. We sure as hell belong there.”

He smiled a little, rearguard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.

“It’s too late for that,” he said quietly. “Much too late for that.”

Down by the Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device’s ability to do the job.

“Look,” said Hansen irritably, as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. “It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it’s patterned the trace, there’s nothing short of a dark body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there’s no problem.”

“That isn’t impossible,” Hand told him. “Run the mass detector backup again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.”

Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-metre buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini’s hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.

“All ready for the Big Deep,” he said.

With the launch cradle assembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping’s help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then round in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it and yawned.

“Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?” he asked.

I checked my retinal time display, where I’d synchronised a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy’s nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.

“Oh for Samedi’s sake,” said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. “Well don’t just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me—”

She ripped apart.

I was closest, already turning to answer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upwards in a careless back-and-forth scribble and tossed the pieces skywards in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of total body gymnast’s trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.

I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word no, torn loose of its meaning.

Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.

I could see

Yells from the Nagini.

the thing

Someone cut loose with a blaster.

that did it.

Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of a half dozen, pale grey and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.

They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.

The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen trod past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.

“Get back!” I screamed at him. “Get the fuck back!”

The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.

Too late.

Hansen must have thought he was up against armouring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He’d spread his beam to beat the latter and was closing to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporises.

The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to glass in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.

I walked in, firing.

The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometre precision.

Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

I emptied both guns.

They spat out their magazines and gaped open, eagerly. I pounded the butts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun butts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chefs knife.

I emptied again.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank’s head looking up at me.

It had fallen face up on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she was going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

I dropped my arms. The bar.

My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me. In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side. “Get me a corrosion grenade,” I said, and my voice was unrecognisable in my own ears.

The Nagini held station, three metres above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the Nagini’s holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand’s insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor panels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of—

Stop that.

Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation and deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser sealed at the neck and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human shaped.

Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalised anything non-organic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank’s weapons either.

I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping’s microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

“Take a look.” Sun glanced round at me, and cleared her throat. “It’s what you said.”

“Then I don’t need to look.”

“You’re saying these are the nanobes?” asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. “Not—”

“The gate isn’t even fucking open, Sutjiadi.” I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

Sun peered again into the microscope’s screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.

“It’s an interlocking configuration,” she said. “But the components don’t actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It’s like a, I don’t know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nanobe generates a portion of the field and that’s what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just passes through it. It might vaporise a few individual nanobes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that’s not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing’s organic.”

Hand looked down at me curiously. “You knew this?”

I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.

I made an effort to hold it down.

“I worked it out. In the firefight.” I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me too. “Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don’t work, because we’ve already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They’ve evolved to beat it, and now they’ve got conferred immunity to beam weapons.”

“And the ultravibe?” Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.

She shook her head. “I’ve passed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nanobes resonate inside the field, but it doesn’t damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam.”

“Solid ammunition’s the only thing that works,” said Hand thoughtfully.

“Yeah, and not for much longer.” I got up to leave. “Give them some time, they’ll evolve past that too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later.”

“Where are you going, Kovacs?”

“If I were you, Hand, I’d get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they’re likely to start growing longer arms.”

I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch to his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank’s Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three metres below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.

I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.

Cruickshank flickered through my head. Grinning, focused on a task, smoking, in the throes of orgasm, shredded into the sky—

Stop that.

I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.

“Kovacs.” He crouched to my level and started again. “Kovacs, I am sorry. She was a fine sol—”

The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backwards with the shock.

“Shut up Jiang.” I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. “You say one more fucking word and I’ll paint Luc with your brains.”

I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung onto it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.

One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There’d been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.

From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn’t muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.

Did I not tell you there was work for me here?

I closed my eyes.

Where is my antipersonnel round, Wedge Wolf? Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it?

I don’t—

Are you looking for me now?

I don’t do that shit no more.

Laughter, like the gravel of cortical stacks pouring from a skip.

“Kovacs?”

I looked up. It was Luc Deprez.

“I think you had better come upstairs,” he said.

Over our heads, the noise seemed to have quietened down.

“We are not,” said Hand quietly, looking around the cabin, “I repeat, not leaving here without staking a Mandrake claim on the other side of that gate. Read the terms of your contracts. The phrasing every available avenue of opportunity is paramount and omnipresent. Whatever Captain Sutjiadi orders you to do now, you will be executed and returned to the soul dumps if we leave without exploring those avenues. Am I making myself clear?”

“No, you’re not,” shouted Ameli Vongsavath through the connecting hatch from the cockpit. “Because the only avenue I can see is carrying a fucked marker buoy up the beach by hand and trying to throw it bodily through the gate on the off-chance it might still work. That doesn’t sound to me like an opportunity for anything except suicide. These things take your stack.”

“We can scan for the nanobes—” But angry voices trampled Hand down. He raised his hands over his head in exasperation. Sutjiadi snapped for quiet, and got it.

“We are soldiers.” Jiang spoke unexpectedly into the sudden lull. “Not Kempist conscripts. This is not a fighting chance.”

He looked around, seeming to have surprised himself as much as anyone else.

“When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,” Hand said, “you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That’s what I’m buying from you now.”

Jiang looked at him with open disdain. “I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.”

“Oh, Damballah,” Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. “What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think paid for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for me. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.”

“Hand.” I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the centre of the cabin. “I think your sales technique’s flagging. Why don’t you give it rest?”

“Kovacs, I am not—”

“Sit down.” The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.

Faces turned expectantly in my direction.

Not this again.

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We can’t. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can’t. Not until we’ve placed the buoy.”

I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.

I turned to Hand.

“Why don’t you tell them who deployed the OPERN system? Tell them why.”

He just looked at me.

“Alright. I’ll tell them.” I looked round at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. “Our sponsor here has a few home-grown enemies back in Landfall who’d quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn’t. So far that hasn’t worked, but back in Landfall they don’t know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we’ll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?”

Hand nodded.

“And the Wedge code?” asked Sutjiadi. “That counts for nothing?”

More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.

“What Wedge co—”

“Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—”

“How come we didn’t—”

“Shut up, all of you.” To my amazement, they did. “Wedge command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren’t made aware of it because,” I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab, “you didn’t need to know. You didn’t matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?”

He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.

“Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,” he said with the measure of a lecturer. “Whoever deployed the OPERN system nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same channels will provide them with the authorisation codes Isaac Carrera operates under. The Wedge are the most likely candidates to shoot us down.”

Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. “You’re Wedge, Kovacs. I don’t believe they will murder one of their own. They’re not known for it.”

I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.

“Unfortunately,” I said. “Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand’s enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It’ll short-circuit any influence I have.”

“You could not bluff? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.”

I nodded. “I might try that. But the odds aren’t good, and there is an easier way.”

That cut across the low babble of dispute.

Deprez inclined his head. “And that is?”

“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we’re home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we’ve found, Hand’s pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we’re dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.”

It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all fucking looking at me.

Please, not this again.

“The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.”

The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They’d come round. They’d come round because they’d see what Hand and I already knew. They’d see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn’t see it that way—

I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.

Anyone who didn’t see it that way, I’d shoot.

For someone whose speciality was machine systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the Nagini up to less than fifty metres off the cave entrance. With the forward re-entry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.

It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun’s cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.

It was a sound like the world splintering apart.

I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn’t space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn’t feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disconnected at the images, rock changing colour with shocking vividness as it crazed and shattered under pressures of plate-tectonic magnitude, then the rushing collapse of the shards as they hurried downward, turned to dense clouds of powder before they could escape the ultravibe beams probing back and forth in the debris. I could feel a vague discomfort in the pit of my stomach from the backwash. Sun was firing on low intensity and shielding in the weapons pod kept the worst of the ultravibe blast damped down aboard the Nagini. But still the shrill scream of the beam and the pittering screeches of the tortured rock clawed their way in through the two open hatches and screwed into my ears like surgery.

I kept seeing Cruickshank die.

Twenty-three minutes.

The ultravibe shut down.

The gate emerged from the devastation and billowing dust like a tree through a blizzard. Wardani had told me it wouldn’t be harmed by any weapon she knew of, but Sun had still programmed the Nagini’s weapon systems to cease fire as soon as they had visual. Now, as the dust clouds began to drift away, I saw the tangled remnants of the archaeologue’s equipment, torn and flung apart by the final seconds of the ultravibe blast. It was hard to believe the dense integrity of the artefact bulking above the debris.

A tiny feather of awe brushed down my spine, a sudden recollection of what I was looking at. Sutjiadi’s words came back to me.

We do not belong here. We are not ready.

I shrugged it off.

“Kovacs?” From the sound of Ameli Vongsavath’s voice over the induction rig, I wasn’t the only one with the elder civilisation jitters.

“Here.”

“I’m closing the deck hatches. Stand clear.”

The machine-gun mounts slid smoothly backward into the body of the deck and the hatches lowered, shutting out the light. A moment later, the interior lighting flickered on, cold.

“Some movement.” Sun said warningly. She was on the general channel, and I heard the succession of sharp indrawn breaths from the rest of the crew.

There was a slight jolt as Vongsavath shifted the Nagini up a few more metres. I steadied myself against the bulkhead and, despite myself, looked down at the deck under my feet.

“No, it’s not under us.” It was as if Sun had been watching me. “It’s, I think it’s going for the gate.”

“Fuck, Hand. How much of this thing is there?” Deprez asked.

I could almost see the Mandrake exec’s shrug.

“I’m not aware of any limits on the OPERN system’s growth potential. It may have spread under the whole beach for all I know.”

“I think that’s unlikely,” said Sun, with the calm of a lab technician in mid-experiment. “The remote sensing would have found something that large. And besides, it has not consumed the other sentry robots, which it would if it were spreading laterally. I suspect it opened a gap in our perimeter and then flowed through in linear—”

“Look,” said Jiang. “It’s there.”

On the screen over my head, I saw the arms of the thing emerge from the rubble-strewn ground around the gate. Maybe it had already tried to come up under the foundation and failed. The cables were a good two metres from the nearest edge of the plinth when they struck.

“Here we fucking go,” said Schneider.

“No, wait.” This was Wardani, a soft gleam in her voice that could almost have been pride. “Wait and see.”

The cables seemed to be having trouble getting a grip on the material the gate was made of. They lashed down, then slid off as if oiled. I watched the process repeat itself a half dozen times, and then drew a sharp breath as another, longer arm erupted from the sand, flailed upward a half dozen metres and wrapped around the lower slopes of the spire. If the same limb had come up under the Nagini, it could have dragged us out of the sky comfortably.

The new cable flexed and tightened.

And disintegrated.

At first, I thought Sun had disregarded my instructions and opened fire again with the ultravibe. Then recollection caught up. The nanobes were immune to vibe weapons.

The other cables were gone as well.

“Sun? What the fuck happened?”

“I am attempting to ascertain exactly that.” Sun’s machine associations were starting to leak into her speech patterns.

“It turned it off,” Wardani said simply.

“Turned what off?” asked Deprez.

And now I could hear the smile in the archaeologue’s voice. “The nanobes exist in an electromagnetic envelope. That’s what binds them together. The gate just turned off the field.”

“Sun?”

“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct. I can detect no electromagnetic activity anywhere near the artefact. And no motion.”

The faint hiss of static on the induction rig as everyone digested the confirmation. Then Deprez’s voice, thoughtful.

“And we’re supposed to fly through that thing?”

Considering what had gone before and what was to come on the other side, zero hour at the gate was remarkably undramatic. At two and a half minutes to zero, the dripping blobs of ultraviolet we’d seen through Wardani’s filigree screen became slowly visible as liquid purple lines playing up and down along the outer edges of the spire. In the daylight, the display was no more impressive than a landing beacon by dawn light.

At eighteen seconds, something seemed to happen along the recessed foldings, something like wings being shaken.

At nine seconds a dense black dot appeared without any fuss at the point of the spire. It was shiny, like a single drop of high-grade lubricant, and it appeared to be rolling around on its own axis.

Eight seconds later, it expanded with unhurried smoothness to the base of the spire, and then beyond. The plinth disappeared, and then the sand to a depth of about a metre.

In the globe of darkness, stars glimmered.