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 f*cked 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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.”
“F*ck, 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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.