Chapter FOURTEEN
In recall, their faces come back to me.
Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.
The faces of the dead.
Ole Hansen:
Ludicrously pale Caucasian, cropped hair like snow, eyes the calm blue of the digit displays on medical equipment in non-critical mode. Shipped in whole from Latimer with the first wave of cryocapped UN reinforcements, back when everyone thought Kemp was going to be a six-month pushover.
“This had better not be another desert engagement.” There were still patches of sunscorched red across his forehead and cheekbones. “Because if it is, you can just put me back in the box. That cellular melanin itches like f*ck.”
“It’s cold where we’re going,” I assured him. “Latimer City winter at warmest. You know your team is dead?”
A nod. “Saw the flash from the ‘copter. Last thing I remember. It figures. Captured marauder bomb. I told them to just blow the motherf*cker where it lay. You can’t talk those things round. Too stubborn.”
Hansen was part of a crack demolitions unit called the Soft Touch. I’d heard of them on the Wedge grapevine. They had a reputation for getting it right most of the time. Had had.
“You going to miss them?”
Hansen turned in his seat and looked across the virtual hotel room to the hospitality unit. He looked back at Hand.
“May I?”
“Help yourself.”
He got up and went to the forest of bottles, selected one and poured amber liquid into a tumbler until it was brim full. He raised the drink in our direction, lips tight and blue eyes snapping.
“Here’s to the Soft Touch, wherever their fragmented f*cking atoms may be. Epitaph: they should have listened to f*cking orders. They’d f*cking be here now.”
He poured the drink down his throat in a single smooth motion, grunted deep in his throat and tossed the glass away across the room underhand. It hit the carpeted floor with an undramatic thump and rolled to the wall. Hansen came back to the table and sat down. There were tears in his eyes, but I guess that was the alcohol.
“Any other questions?” he asked, voice ripped.
Yvette Cruickshank:
A twenty-year-old, face so black it was almost blue, bone structure that belonged somewhere on the forward profile of a high-altitude interceptor, a dreadlocked mane gathered up the height of a fist before it spilled back down, hung with dangerous-looking steel jewellery and a couple of spare quickplant plugs, coded green and black. The jacks at the base of her skull showed three more.
“What are those?” I asked her.
“Linguapack, Thai and Mandarin, Ninth Dan Shotokan,” she fingered her way up the braille-tagged feathers in a fashion that suggested she could probably rip and change blind and under fire. “Advanced Field Medic.”
“And the ones in your hair?”
“Satnav interface and concert violin.” She grinned. “Not much call for that one recently, but it keeps me lucky.” Her face fell with comic abruptness that made me bite my lip. “Kept.”
“You’ve requested rapid deployment posts seven times in the last year,” said Hand. “Why is that?”
She gave him a curious look. “You already asked me that.”
“Different me.”
“Oh, I get it. Ghost in the machine. Yeah, well, like I said before. Closer focus, more influence over combat outcomes, better toys. You know, you smiled more the last time I said that.”
Jiang Jianping:
Pale Asiatic features, intelligent eyes with a slightly inward cast, and a light smile. You had the impression that he was contemplating some subtly amusing anecdote he’d just been told. Aside from the callused edges of his hands and a looseness of stance below his black coveralls, there was little to hint at his trade. He looked more like a slightly weary teacher than someone who knew fifty-seven separate ways to make a human body stop working.
“This expedition,” he murmured, “is presumably not within the general ambit of the war. It is a commercial matter, yes?”
I shrugged. “Whole war’s a commercial matter, Jiang.”
“You may believe that.”
“So may you,” said Hand severely. “I am privy to government communiqués at the highest level, and I’m telling you. Without the Cartel, the Kempists would have been in Landfall last winter.”
“Yes. That is what I was fighting to prevent.” He folded his arms. “That is what I died to prevent.”
“Good,” said Hand briskly. “Tell us about that.”
“I have already answered this question. Why do you repeat it?”
The Mandrake exec rubbed at his eye.
“That wasn’t me. It was a screening construct. There hasn’t been time to review the data so, please.”
“It was a night assault in the Danang plain, a mobile relay station for the Kempists’ marauder-bomb management system.”
“You were part of that?” I looked at the ninja in front of me with new respect. In the Danang theatre, the covert strikes on Kemp’s communications net were the only real success the government could claim in the last eight months. I knew soldiers whose lives had been saved by the operation. The propaganda channels had still been trumpeting the news of strategic victory about the time my platoon and I were getting shot to pieces up on the Northern Rim.
“I was honoured enough to be appointed cell commander.”
Hand looked at his palm, where data was scrolling down like some mobile skin disease. Systems magic. Virtual toys.
“Your cell achieved its objectives, but you were killed when they pulled out. How did that happen?”
“I made a mistake.” Jiang enunciated the words with the same distaste he had pronounced Kemp’s name.
“And what was that?” No one could have given the Mandrake exec points for tact.
“I believed the automated sentry systems would deactivate when the station was blown. They did not.”
“Oops.”
He flicked a glance at me.
“My cell could not withdraw without cover. I stayed behind.”
Hand nodded. “Admirable.”
“It was my error. And it was a small price to pay to halt the Kempist advance.”
“You’re not a big Kemp fan, are you, Jiang?” I kept my tone careful. It looked as if we’d got a believer here.
“The Kempists preach a revolution,” he said scornfully, “But what will change if they take power on Sanction IV?”
I scratched my ear. “Well, there’ll be a lot more statues of Joshua Kemp in public places, I imagine. Apart from that, probably not much.”
“Exactly. And for this he has sacrificed how many hundreds of thousands of lives?”
“Hard to say. Look, Jiang, we’re not Kempists. If we get what we want, I can promise you there’ll be a big renewed interest in making sure Kemp gets nowhere near power on Sanction IV. Will that do?”
He placed his hands flat on the table and studied them for a while.
“Do I have an alternative?” he asked.
Ameli Vongsavath:
A narrow, hawk-nosed face the colour of tarnished copper. Hair in a tidy pilot cut that was growing out, henna streaking black. At the back, tendrils of it almost covered the silvered sockets that would take the flight symbiote cables. Beneath the left eye, black tattooed cross-hatching marked the cheekbone where the dataflow filaments would go in. The eye above was a liquid crystal grey, mismatched with the dark brown of the right-hand pupil.
“Hospital stock,” she said, when her augmented vision noticed where I was looking. “I took some fire over Bootkinaree Town last year, and it blew out the dataflow. They patched me up in orbit.”
“You flew back out with blown datafeeds?” I asked sceptically. The overload would have shattered every circuit in her cheekbone and scorched tissue for half a handsbreadth in every direction. “What happened to your autopilot?”
She grimaced. “Fried.”
“So how did you run the controls in that state?”
“I shut down the machine and flew it on manual. Cut back to basic thrust and trim. This was a Lockheed Mitoma—their controls still run manually if you do that.”
“No, I meant how did you run the controls with the state you were in.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “I have a high pain threshold.”
Right.
Luc Deprez:
Tall and untidy, sandy blond hair grown longer than made sense for a battlefield, and in nothing you’d call a style. Face made up of sharp Caucasian angles, long bony nose, lantern jaw, eyes a curious shade of green. Sprawled at ease in the virtual chair, head tilted to one side as if he couldn’t quite make us out in this light.
“So.” He acquired my Landfall Lights from the table with a long arm and shook one out of the packet. “You going to tell me something about this gig?”
“No,” said Hand. “It’s confidential until you’re on board.”
A throaty chuckle amidst smoke as he puffed the cigarette to life. “That’s what you said last time. And like I said to you last time, who the hell am I going to tell, man. You don’t want to hire me, I’m going straight back into the tin can, right?”
“Nonetheless.”
“Alright. So you want to ask me something?”
“Tell us about your last covert assault tag,” I suggested.
“That’s confidential.” He surveyed our unsmiling faces for a moment. “Hey, that was a joke. I already told your partner all about it. Didn’t he brief you?”
I heard Hand make a compressed sound.
“Ah, that was a construct,” I said hurriedly. “We’re hearing this for the first time. Run through it again for us.”
Deprez shrugged. “Sure, why not. Was a hit on one of Kemp’s sector commanders. Inside his cruiser.”
“Successful?”
He grinned at me. “I would say so. The head, you know. It came off.”
“I just wondered. You being dead and all.”
“That was bad luck. The f*ck’s blood was deterrent toxin-loaded. Slow-acting. We didn’t find out until we were airborne and heading out.”
Hand frowned. “You got splashed?”
“No, man.” A pained expression flitted across the angular face. “My partner, she caught the spray when the carotid went. Right in the eyes.” He plumed smoke at the ceiling. “Too bad, she was our pilot.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. We flew into the side of a building.” He grinned again. “That was fast-acting, man.”
Markus Sutjiadi:
Beautiful with an uncanny geometric perfection of feature that could have sat alongside Lapinee somewhere in the net. Eyes almond in shade and shape, mouth a straight line, face tending towards an inverted isosceles triangle, blunted at its corners to provide the solid chin and wide forehead, straight black hair plastered down. Features curiously immobile, as if drugged into detachment. A sense of energy conserved, of waiting. The face of a global pin-up who’d played too much competition poker recently.
“Boo!” I couldn’t resist it.
The almond eyes barely flickered.
“There are serious charges outstanding against you,” said Hand with a reproachful glance in my direction.
“Yes.”
We all waited for a moment, but Sutjiadi clearly didn’t think there was any more to say on the subject. I started to like him.
Hand threw out a hand like a conjurer, and a screen evolved into the air just beyond his splayed fingers. More f*cking system magic. I sighed and watched as a head and shoulders in a uniform like mine evolved beside a downscroll of biodata. The face was familiar.
“You murdered this man,” Hand said coldly. “Would you like to explain why?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t have to,” I gestured at the face on the screen. “Dog Veutin gets a lot of people that way. I’m just interested to know how you managed to kill him.”
This time, the eyes lost some of their flatness, and his gaze glanced briefly off my Wedge insignia, confused.
“I shot him in the back of the head.”
I nodded. “Shows initiative. Is he really dead?”
“Yes. I used a Sunjet on full charge.”
Hand system-magicked the screen away with a snap of his fingers. “Your brig shuttle may have been shot out of the sky, but the Wedge think your stack probably survived. There’s a reward posted for anyone who turns it up. They still want you for formal execution.” He looked sideways at me. “As I understand it that tends to be a pretty unpleasant business.”
“Yeah, it is.” I’d seen a couple of these object lessons early on in my career with the Wedge. They took a long time.
“I have no interest in seeing you handed over to the Wedge,” said Hand. “But I cannot risk this expedition on a man who will carry insubordination to these extremes. I need to know what happened.”
Sutjiadi was watching my face. I gave him the faintest hint of a nod.
“He ordered my men decimated,” he said tightly.
I nodded again, to myself this time. Decimation was, by all accounts, one of Veutin’s favourite forms of liaison with local troops.
“And why was that?”
“Oh for f*ck’s sake, Hand,” I turned in my seat. “Didn’t you hear him? He was ordered to decimate his command, and he didn’t want to. That kind of insubordination, I can live with.”
“There may be factors which—”
“We’re wasting time,” I snapped, and turned back to Sutjiadi. “Given the same situation again, is there anything you’d do differently?”
“Yes.” He showed me his teeth. I’m not sure I’d call it a grin. “I’d have the Sunjet on wide beam. That way I’d have half-cooked his whole squad, and they wouldn’t have been in any condition to arrest me.”
I tipped a glance back at Hand. He was shaking his head, one hand up to his eyes.
Sun Liping:
Dark Mongol eyes shelved in epicanthic folds on high, broad cheekbones. A mouth poised in a faint downturn that might have been the aftermath of rueful laughter. Fine lines in the tanned skin and a solid fall of black hair draped over one shoulder and held firmly in place by a big silver static field generator. An aura of calm, equally unshakeable.
“You killed yourself?” I asked doubtfully
“So they tell me.” The downturned lips amped up to a crooked grimace. “I remember pulling the trigger. It’s gratifying to know my aim doesn’t deteriorate under pressure.”
The slug from her sidearm had gone in under the right jaw line, ploughed directly through the centre of the brain and blown an admirably symmetrical hole in the top of her head on its way out.
“Hard to miss at that range,” I said with experimental brutality.
The calm eyes never flinched.
“I understand it can be done,” she said gravely.
Hand cleared his throat. “Would you like to tell us why you did it?”
She frowned. “Again?”
“That,” said Hand through slightly gritted teeth, “was a debriefing construct, not me.”
“Oh.”
The eyes slanted sideways and up, searching, I guessed, for a retina-wired peripheral scroll down. The virtuality had been written not to render internal hardware, except in Mandrake personnel, but she showed no surprise at a lack of response so maybe she was just remembering it the old-fashioned way.
“It was a squadron of automated armour. Spider tanks. I was trying to undermine their response parameters, but there was a viral booby trap wired into the control systems. A Rawling variant, I believe.” The mild grimace again. “There was very little time to take stock, as you can probably imagine, so I can’t be sure. In any event, there was no time to jack out; the primary baffles of the virus had already welded me in. In the time I had before it downloaded fully, I could only come up with the one option.”
“Very impressive,” said Hand.
When it was done, we went back up to the roof to clear our heads. I leaned on a parapet and looked out over the curfewed quiet of Landfall while Hand went off to find some coffee. The terraces behind me were deserted, chairs and tables scattered like some hieroglyphic message left for orbital eyes. The night had cooled off while we were below, and the breeze made me shiver. Sun Liping’s words came back to me.
Rawling variant.
It was the Rawling virus that had killed the Innenin beachhead. Had made Jimmy de Soto claw out his own eye before he died. State-of-the-art back then, cheap off-the-rack military surplus now. The only viral software Kemp’s hard-pressed forces could afford.
Times change, but market forces are forever. History unreels, the real dead stay that way.
The rest of us get to go on.
Hand came back apologetically with machine-coffee canisters. He handed me mine and leaned on the parapet at my side.
“So what do you think?” he asked after a while.
“I think it tastes like shit.”
He chuckled. “What do you think of our team?”
“They’ll do.” I sipped at the coffee and brooded on the city below. “I’m not overhappy about the ninja, but he’s got some useful skills and he seems prepared to get killed in the line of duty, which is always a big advantage in a soldier. How long to prep the clones?”
“Two days. Maybe a little less.”
“It’ll be twice that before these people are up to speed in a new sleeve. Can we do the induction in virtual?”
“I see no reason why not. The MAI can spin out hundred per cent accurate renderings for each clone from the raw data in the biolab machines. Running at three-fifty times real, we can give the whole team a full month in their new sleeves, on site in the Dangrek construct, all inside a couple of hours, real time.”
“Good,” I said, and wondered why it didn’t feel that way.
“My own reservations are with Sutjiadi. I am not convinced that a man like that can be expected to take orders well.”
I shrugged. “So give him the command.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not? He’s qualified for it. He’s got the rank, and he’s had the experience. Seems to have loyalty to his men.”
Hand said nothing. I could sense his frown across the half metre of parapet that separated us.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “I had just. Assumed. You would want the command yourself.”
I saw the platoon again as the smart shrapnel barrage erupted overhead. Lightning flash, explosions, and then the fragments, skipping and hissing hungrily through the quicksilver flashing curtain of the rain. Crackling of blaster discharge in the background, like something ripping.
Screams.
What was on my face didn’t feel like a smile, but evidently it was.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ve read my file, Hand.”
“Yes.”
“And you still thought I wanted the command. Are you f*cking insane?”