Chapter TEN
Dangrek.
The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.
A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.
“Should be colder than this,” he said.
“Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.” I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. “This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?”
“Not as yet.” Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. “Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes…”
He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.
“It’ll do,” she said distantly. “I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.”
“Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.” A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.
“Yes.” Another pause. “Of course. This way.”
She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.
A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.
I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.
We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—
I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.
“Hand. What’s that?”
“That?” He saw where I was pointing. “Oh, that. Grey area.”
“I can see that.” Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. “What’s it doing there?”
But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the pre-knowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rock fall.
Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.
“It’s Sauberville,” she said flatly. “Isn’t it?”
Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. “That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The MAI posits a fifty per cent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.”
A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of a hundred and twenty thousand.
“Reduced how?” I asked.
Hand shrugged. “It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.”
“Tactical nuke,” said Schneider tonelessly. “Riding a marauder delivery system.”
“Well, it’s what he’s got.” Hand shrugged again. “And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.”
“Motherf*cking psycho,” said Schneider, apparently to the sky.
Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she was trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.
“So.” Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. “Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.”
Wardani turned away. “It’s down on the beach,” she said.
The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale blue shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practised flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.
We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. She was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.
“That’s it.” She nodded ahead. “That’s where we buried it.”
“Buried it?” Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. “How exactly did you bury it?”
Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. “Use your eyes, man. How do you think?”
“You blew it up?”
“Bored charges.” Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. “Two metres in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.”
“You.” Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. “Blew up. An artefact?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.” Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. “Where do you think we found the f*cking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery—this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.”
“I hope you’re right.” Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. “Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million UN dollars for damaged goods.”
“What brought the rock down?” I asked suddenly.
Schneider turned, grinning. “I told you, man. Bored—”
“No.” I was looking at Tanya Wardani. “I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction under water, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?”
“Yeah, Tanya,” Schneider nodded vigorously. “You never did nail that one, did you? I mean we talked about it, but…”
“It’s a good point.” Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. “What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?”
The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.
“Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.”
I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. “Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.”
“Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.”
“Leakage?” asked Hand dubiously.
Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy now Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the packet, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.
“Look,” she said finally, “This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does, at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.”
When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.
“Alright. How long does a heavy load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.” She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. “Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, metres wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours, that’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?”
“A lot of energy,” said Hand impatiently. “So what’s this about leakage?”
“Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. “And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ‘cast duration of a few seconds, well, it doesn’t add up to much air time. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilisation with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.”
“Oops.”
The archaeologue nicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.
“Quite,” she said acidly. “Oops. Now the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.”
I nodded. “So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—”
“And buries itself under five hundred thousand tonnes of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Wardani.”
The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. “I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.”
“Or,” said Schneider brightly. “It could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?”
“We already talked about this, Jan.” Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. “It’s not—”
“It’s possible, alright.”
“Yes. It’s just not very likely.” She turned away from Schneider and faced me. “It’s hard to be sure—a lot of the glyphs were like nothing I’d ever seen before, and they’re hard to read, but I’m pretty certain there’s a power brake built in. Above certain velocities, nothing gets through.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Schneider was sulking. “You said yourself you couldn’t—”
“Yes, but it makes sense, Jan. You don’t build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you’re likely to find out there.”
“Oh, come on Tanya, what about—”
“Lieutenant Kovacs,” said Hand loudly. “Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I’d like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Sure.”
We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand’s shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out of nowhere, Hand spoke.
“Remarkable woman.”
I grunted.
“I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigours of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon…”
“She’ll be fine,” I said shortly.
“Yes, I’m sure she will.” A delicate pause. “I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.”
“That’s over, I think.”
“Oh, really?”
There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.
“About this military perspective, Hand.”
“Oh, yes.” The Mandrake exec stopped a few metres short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. “I’m not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn’t ideal fighting ground.”
“Got it in one.” I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. “Once we get down here, we’re a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It’s an open field of fire right back to the foothills.”
“And then there’s the sea.”
“And then there’s the sea,” I echoed gloomily. “We’re open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we’ll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That’s unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.”
“Hmm.” Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. “I’ve talked to the lawyers.”
“Did you disinfect afterwards?”
“Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artefact in non-orbital space is only considered valid if a rally operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometre of said artefact. No loopholes, we’ve looked. If there’s a starship on the other side of this gate, we’re going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that’s going to take some time.”
I shrugged. “A small army, then.”
“A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It’ll show up on satellite tracking like a holowhore’s chest. And we can’t really afford that, can we?”
“A holowhore’s chest? I don’t know, the surgery can’t be that expensive.”
Hand cocked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. “Very droll. Thank you. We can’t really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?”
“Not if you want an exclusive.”
“I think that goes without saying, lieutenant.” Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. “So then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit.”
“If we want to come out alive, yes.”
“Yes.” Unexpectedly, Hand rocked back on his heels and dumped himself into a sitting position in the sand. He rested his forearms on his knees and seemed lost in searching the horizon for something. In the dark executive suit and white winged collar, he looked like a sketch by one of the Millsport absurdist school.
“Tell me, lieutenant,” he said finally. “Assuming we can get the peninsula cleared, in your professional opinion, what’s the lower limit on a support team for this venture? How few can we get away with?”
I thought about it. “If they’re good. Spec ops, not just plankton-standard grunts. Say six. Five, if you use Schneider as flyer.”
“Well, he doesn’t strike me as the sort to be left behind while we look after his investment for him.”
“No.”
“You said spec ops. Do you have any specific skills in mind?”
“Not really. Demolitions, maybe. That rock fall looks pretty solid. And it wouldn’t hurt if a couple of them could fly a shuttle, just in case something happens to Schneider.”
Hand twisted his head round to look up at me. “Is that likely?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Dangerous world out there.”
“Indeed.” Hand went back to watching the place where the sea met the grey of Sauberville’s undecided fate. “I take it you’ll want to do the recruiting yourself.”
“No, you can run it. But I want to sit in, and I want veto on anyone you select. You got any idea where you’re going to get half a dozen spec ops volunteers? Without ringing any alarm bells, I mean.”
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me. The horizon seemed to have him body and soul. Then he shifted slightly and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.
“In these troubled times,” he murmured, almost to himself, “it shouldn’t be a problem finding soldiers who won’t be missed.”
“Glad to hear it.”
He glanced up again and there were still traces of the smile clinging to his mouth.
“Does that offend you, Kovacs?”
“You think I’d be a lieutenant in Carrera’s Wedge if I offended that easily?”
“I don’t know.” Hand looked back out to the horizon again. “You’ve been full of surprises so far. And I understand that Envoys are generally pretty good at adaptive camouflage.”
So.
Less than two full days since the meeting in the auction hall, and Hand had already penetrated the Wedge datacore and unpicked whatever shielding Carrera had applied to my Envoy past. He was just letting me know.
I lowered myself to the blued sand beside him and picked my own point on the horizon to stare at.
“I’m not an Envoy any more.”
“No. So I understand.” He didn’t look at me. “No longer an Envoy, no longer in Carrera’s Wedge. This rejection of groupings is verging on pathological, lieutenant.”
“There’s no verging about it.”
“Ah. I see some evidence of your Harlan’s World origins emerging. The essential evil of massed humanity, wasn’t that what Quell called it?”
“I’m not a Quellist, Hand.”
“Of course not.” The Mandrake exec appeared to be enjoying himself. “That would necessitate being part of a group. Tell me, Kovacs, do you hate me?”
“Not yet.”
“Really? You surprise me.”
“Well, I’m full of surprises.”
“You honestly have no feelings of rancour towards me after your little run-in with Deng and his squad.”
I shrugged again. “They’re the ones with the added ventilation.”
“But I sent them.”
“All that shows is a lack of imagination.” I sighed. “Look, Hand. I knew someone in Mandrake would send a squad, because that’s the way organisations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn’t have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully’s nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully’s wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don’t hate you personally, because you haven’t given me any reason to yet.”
“But you hate Mandrake.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says, rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?”
“People.”
“That’s right. People. It’s all people. People and their stupid f*cking groups. Show me an individual decision-maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I’ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I’ll take them all down if I can. But don’t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.”
“How very balanced of you.”
“Your government would call it antisocial derangement, and put me in a camp for it.”
Hand’s lip curled. “Not my government. We’re just wet-nursing these clowns till Kemp calms down.”
“Why bother? Can’t you deal direct with Kemp?”
I wasn’t looking, but I got the sense that his gaze had jerked sideways as I said it. It took him a while to formulate a response he was happy with.
“Kemp is a crusader,” he said finally. “He has surrounded himself with others like him. And crusaders do not generally see sense until they are nailed to it. The Kempists will have to be defeated, bloodily and resoundingly, before they can be brought to the negotiating table.”
I grinned. “So you’ve tried.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. You didn’t.” I found a violet pebble in the sand and tossed it into the placid ripples in front of us. Time to change the subject. “You didn’t say when you were going to get our spec ops escort, either.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“The soul markets?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
I shook my head, but inside me something smoked off the detachment like stubborn embers.
“By the way.” Hand twisted around to look back at the rock fall. “I have an alternative explanation for that collapsed cliff.”
“You didn’t buy the micrometeorite, then?”
“I am inclined to believe in Mistress Wardani’s velocity brake. It makes sense. As does her circuit-breaker theory, to a point.”
“That point being?”
“That if a race as advanced as the Martians appear to have been built a circuit breaker, it would work properly. It would not leak.”
“No.”
“So we are left with the question. Why, fifty thousand years ago, did this cliff collapse. Or perhaps, why was it collapsed?”
I groped around for another pebble. “Yeah, I wondered about that.”
“An open door to any given set of coordinates across interplanetary, possibly even interstellar distances. That’s dangerous, conceptually and in fact. There’s no telling what might come through a door like that. Ghosts, aliens, monsters with half-metre fangs.” He glanced sideways at me. “Quellists, even.”
I found a second, larger stone somewhere back behind me.
“Now that would be bad,” I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. “The end of civilisation as we know it.”
“Precisely. Something which the Martians, no doubt, also thought of and built for. Along with the power brake and the circuit breaker, they would presumably have a monster-with-half-metre-fangs contingency system.”
From somewhere Hand produced a pebble of his own and spun it out over the water. It was a good throw from a seated position, but it still fell a little short of the ripples I had created with my last stone. Wedge-customised neurachem—hard to beat. Hand clucked in disappointment.
“That’s some contingency system,” I said. “Bury your gate under half a million tonnes of cliff face.”
“Yes.” He was still frowning at the impact site of his throw, watching as his ripples merged with mine. “It makes you wonder what they were trying to shut out, doesn’t it.”