Chapter THIRTY-THREE
He was lying in one of the bulbous tunnels, about a kilometre deeper into the body of the vessel, suited up and still largely intact. In the soft blue light from the walls, the features behind the faceplate were clearly shrunken onto the bones of the skull, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have decomposed appreciably.
I knelt beside the corpse and peered at the sealed-in face.
“Doesn’t look too bad, considering.”
“Sterile air supply,” said Deprez. He had his Sunjet cocked on his hip, and his eyes flickered constantly into the swollen roof-space overhead. Ten metres further on and looking slightly less comfortable with her weapon, Ameli Vongsavath prowled back and forth by the opening where the tunnel linked to the next bubble chamber. “And antibacterials, if it’s a halfway decent suit. Interesting. The tank’s still a third full. Whatever he died of, it wasn’t suffocation.”
“Any damage to the suit?”
“If there is, I cannot find it.”
I sat back on my heels. “Doesn’t make any sense. This air’s breathable. Why suit up?”
Deprez shrugged. “Why die in your suit on the outside of an open atmosphere lock? None of it makes any sense. I’m not trying any more.”
“Movement,” snapped Vongsavath.
I cleared the right-hand interface gun and joined her at the opening. The lower lip rose a little over a metre from the floor and curved upward like a wide smile before narrowing gradually up towards the roof on either side and finally closing in a tightly rounded apex. There were two metres of clear cover on each side and space to crouch below the lip. It was a sniper’s dream.
Deprez folded into the cover on the left, Sunjet stowed upright at his side. I crouched beside Vongsavath.
“Sounded like something falling,” murmured the pilot. “Not this chamber, maybe the next.”
“Alright.” I felt the neurachem sliding coldly along my limbs, charging my heart. Good to know that, under the bone-deep weariness of the radiation poisoning, the systems were still online. And after grasping so long at shadows, fighting faceless nanobe colonies, the ghosts of the departed, human and not, the promise of solid combat was almost a pleasure.
Scratch almost. I could feel pleasure tickling up the walls of my stomach at the thought of killing something.
Deprez raised one hand from the projection ramp of his Sunjet.
Listen.
This time I heard it—a stealthy scuffing sound across the chamber. I drew the other interface gun and settled into the cover of the raised lip. The Envoy conditioning squeezed the last of the tension out of my muscles and stowed it in coiled reflexes beneath a surface calm.
Something pale moved in a space on the other side of the next chamber. I breathed in and sighted on it.
Here we go.
“You there, Ameli?”
Schneider’s voice.
I heard Vongsavath’s breath hiss out about the same time as mine. She climbed to her feet.
“Schneider? What are you doing? I nearly shot you.”
“Well, that’s f*cking friendly.” Schneider appeared clearly in the opening and swung his leg over. His Sunjet was slung carelessly across one shoulder. “We come rushing to the rescue, and you blow us away for our trouble.”
“Is it another archaeologue?” asked Hand, following Schneider through into the chamber. Incongruous in his right fist was a hand blaster. It was the first time, I realised, that I’d seen the executive armed since I’d known him. It didn’t look right on him. It marred his ninetieth-floor boardroom aura. It was inappropriate, a cracked front, jarring the way genuine battle coverage would in a Lapinee recruiting number. Hand was not a man who wielded weapons himself. Or at least not weapons as straightforward and grubby as a particle blaster.
Plus he’s got a stunner tucked away in his pocket.
Recently powered up to combat readiness, the Envoy conditioning twinged uneasily.
“Come and have a look,” I suggested, masking my disquiet.
The two new arrivals crossed the open ground to us with a blasé lack of caution that screamed at my combat nerves. Hand leaned his hands on the lip of the tunnel entrance and stared at the corpse. His features, I suddenly saw, were ashen with the radiation sickness. His stance looked braced, as if he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand up. There was a tic at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been there when we touched down in the docking bay. Next to him, Schneider looked positively glowing with health.
I crushed out the flicker of sympathy. Welcome to the f*cking club, Hand. Welcome to ground level on Sanction IV.
“He’s suited up,” Hand said.
“Well spotted.”
“How did he die?”
“We don’t know.” I felt another wave of weariness wash through me. “And to be honest I’m not in the mood for an autopsy. Let’s just get this buoy fixed, and get the f*ck out of here.”
Hand gave me a strange look. “We’ll need to take him back.”
“Well, you can help me do it, then.” I walked back to the suited corpse and picked up one leg. “Grab a foot.”
“You’re going to drag him?”
“We, Hand. We are going to drag him. I don’t think he’ll mind.”
It took the best part of an hour to get the corpse back through the tortuous pipes and swooping chambers of the Martian vessel and aboard the Nagini. Most of that was taken up trying to locate the limpet cherries and illuminum arrows of our original mapping, but the radiation sickness took its toll along the way. At different points in the journey, Hand and I were taken with minor bouts of vomiting and had to give hauling the body over to Schneider and Deprez. Time emptying out for the final victims of Sauberville. I thought even Deprez, in his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, was starting to look ill as we fumbled the bulky suited burden through the last opening before the docking station. Now that I focused in the bluish light, Vongsavath too was starting to exhibit the same grey pallor and bruised eyes.
Do you see? whispered something that might have been Semetaire.
There seemed to be a huge, sickly sense of something waiting in the swollen heights of the ship’s architecture, hovering on parchment-thin wings, and watching.
When we were done, I stood staring into the antiseptic violet glow of the corpse locker after the others had left. The tumbled, spacesuited figures within looked like a gaggle of overly padded null G crashball players, collapsed on top of each other when the field goes down and the house lights come up at the end of the match. The pouches containing the remains of Cruickshank, Hansen and Dhasanapongsakul were almost hidden from view.
Dying—
Not dying yet…
The Envoy conditioning, worrying at something not over, not resolved.
The Ground is for Dead People. I saw Schneider’s illuminum tattoo like a beacon floating behind my eyes. His face, twisted unrecognisable with the pain of his injuries.
Dead people?
“Kovacs?” It was Deprez, standing in the hatch behind me. “Hand wants us all back on the platform. We’re taking food. You coming?”
“I’ll catch you up.”
He nodded and dropped back to the floor outside. I heard voices and tried to blank them out.
Dying?
The Ground is
Motes of light circling like a datacoil display
The gate…
The gate, seen through the viewports of the Nagini’s cockpit…
The cockpit…
I shook my head irritably. Envoy intuition is an unreliable system at the best of times, and sinking fast from the weight of radiation poisoning isn’t a great state to be in when you try to deploy it.
Not dying yet.
I gave up on trying to see the pattern and let the vagueness wash over me, seeing where it would take me.
The violet light of the corpse locker, beckoning.
The discarded sleeves within.
Semetaire.
By the time I got back to the platform, dinner was nearly over. Beneath the mummified hovering of the two Martians, the rest of the company were sitting around the stripped-down buoy on inflatable loungers, picking without much enthusiasm at the remains of tab-pull field ration pans. I couldn’t really blame them—the way I was feeling, just the smell of the stuff made my throat close up. I choked a little on it, then hastily raised my hands as the sound brought a ripple of weapon-grabbing from the diners.
“Hey, it’s me.”
Grumbling and guns discarded again. I made my way into the circle, looking for a seat. It was a lounger each, give or take. Jiang Jianping and Schneider had both seated themselves on the floor, Jiang cross-legged in a clear deck space, Schneider sprawled in front of Tanya Wardani’s lounger with a proprietorial air that made my mouth twitch. I waved an offered pan away and seated myself on the edge of Vongsavath’s lounger, wishing I felt a bit more up to this.
“What kept you?” asked Deprez.
“Been thinking.”
Schneider laughed. “Man, that shit’s bad for you. Don’t do it. Here.” He rolled a can of amphetamine cola across the deck towards me. I stopped it with one boot. “Remember what you told me back in the hospital? Don’t f*cking think, soldier—didn’t you read your terms of enlistment?”
It raised a couple of half-hearted smiles. I nodded.
“When’s he get here, Jan?”
“Huh?”
“I said,” I kicked the can back at him. His hand jumped out and snugged it, very fast. “When’s he get here?”
What conversation there was dropped out of the air like Konrad Harlan’s one and only attempted gunship raid on Millsport. Particle-blasted down by the rattle of the can and the sudden silence that found it in Schneider’s closed fist.
His right fist. His empty left was a little too slow, whipping out for a weapon fractions of a second after I had the Kalashnikov levelled on him. He saw, and froze up.
“Don’t.” I told him.
At my side, I felt Vongsavath, still moving for the stunner in her pocket. I laid my free hand on her arm and shook my head slightly. Put some Envoy persuasion into my voice.
“No need, Ameli.”
Her arm dropped back to her lap. Peripheral scan told me everyone else was sitting this one out so far. Even Wardani. I eased slightly.
“When does he get here, Jan?”
“Kovacs, I don’t know what the f*ck—”
“Yeah, you do. When’s he get here? Or don’t you want both hands any more?”
“Who?”
“Carrera. When’s he f*cking get here, Jan. Last chance.”
“I don’t—” Schneider’s voice shrilled to an abrupt scream as the interface gun blew a hole through his hand and turned the can he was still holding into shredded metal. Blood and amphetamine cola splashed the air, curiously alike in colour. Flecks of it spotted Tanya Wardani’s face and she flinched violently.
It’s not a popularity contest.
“What’s the matter, Jan,” I asked gently. “That sleeve Carrera gave you not so hot on endorphin response?”
Wardani was on her feet, face unwiped. “Kovacs, he’s—”
“Don’t tell me it’s the same sleeve, Tanya. You f*cked him, now and two years ago. You know.”
She shook her head numbly. “The tattoo…” she whispered.
“The tattoo is new. Shiny new, even for illuminum. He got it redone, along with some basic cosmetic surgery as part of the package. Isn’t that right, Jan?”
The only thing that came out of Schneider was an agonised groaning. He held his shattered hand at arm’s length, staring at it in disbelief. Blood dripped on the deck.
All I felt was tired.
“I figure you sold out to Carrera rather than go into virtual interrogation,” I said, still scanning peripherally for reactions among the crowd. “Don’t blame you really. And if they offered you a fresh combat sleeve, full rad/chem resist specs and custom trimmed, well there aren’t many deals like that kicking about Sanction IV these days. And no telling how much dirty bombing both sides are going to do from now on in. Yeah, I’d have taken a deal like that.”
“Do you have any evidence of this?” asked Hand.
“Apart from the fact he’s the only one of us still not going grey, you mean? Look at him, Hand. He’s held up better than the Maori sleeves, and they’re built for this shit.”
“I would not call that proof,” said Deprez thoughtfully. “Though it is odd.”
“He’s f*cking lying,” gritted Schneider through his teeth. “If anyone’s running double for Carrera, it’s Kovacs. For Samedi’s sake, he’s a Wedge lieutenant.”
“Don’t push your luck, Jan.”
Schneider glared back at me, keening his pain. Across the platform, I thought I heard the songspires pick it up.
“Get me a f*cking mediwrap,” he pleaded. “Someone.”
Sun reached for her pack. I shook my head.
“No. First he tells us how long we’ve got before Carrera comes through the gate. We need to be ready.”
Deprez shrugged. “Knowing this, are we not already ready?”
“Not for the Wedge.”
Wardani crossed wordlessly to where Sun stood and snatched the medipack from its fibregrip holster on the other woman’s chest. “Give me that. If you uniformed f*cks won’t do it, I will.”
She knelt at Schneider’s side and opened the pack, spilling the entire contents across the floor as she searched for the wraps.
“The green tabbed envelopes,” said Sun helplessly. “There.”
“Thank you,” Wardani gritted. She spared me a single glance. “What are you going to do now, Kovacs? Cripple me too?”
“He would have sold us all out, Tanya. He has already.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know he somehow managed to survive two weeks aboard a restricted access hospital without any legitimate documentation. I know he managed to get into the officers’ wards without a pass.”
Her face contorted. “F*ck you, Kovacs. When we were digging at Dangrek, he bluffed us a nine-week municipal power grant from the Sauberville authorities. With no f*cking documentation.”
Hand cleared his throat.
“I would have thought—”
And the ship lit up around us.
It sheeted through the space under the dome, fragments of suddenly erupting light swelling to solid blocks of translucent colour spun around the central structure. Sparkling discharge spat through the air between the colours, lines of power shaken out like storm-torn sails ripped loose of rigging. Trailing fountains of the stuff poured down from the upper levels of expanding rotating light, splashing off the deck and awakening a deeper glow within the translucent surface where they hit. Above, the stars blotted out. At the centre, the mummified corpses of the Martians disappeared, shrouded in the evolving gale of radiance. There was a sound to it all, but less heard than felt through my light-soaked skin, a building thrum and quiver in the air that felt like the adrenalin rush at the start of combat.
Vongsavath touched my arm.
“Look outside,” she said urgently. For all she was at my side, it felt as if she was yelling through a howling wind. “Look at the gate!”
I tipped my head back and threw the neurachem into seeing through the swirling currents of light to the crystal roof. At first, I couldn’t understand what Vongsavath was talking about. I couldn’t find the gate, and guessed it had to be somewhere on the other side of the ship, completing another orbit. Then I zeroed in on a vague blotch of grey, too dim to be…
And then I understood.
The storm of light and power raging around us was not confined to the air under the dome. Space around the Martian vessel was also seething to life. The stars had faded to dimly-seen gleamings through a curtain of something that stood hazed and shivering, kilometres beyond the orbit of the gate.
“It’s a screen,” said Vongsavath with certainty. “We’re under attack.”
Over our heads, the storm was settling. Motes of shadow swam in the light now, here scattering to corners like shoals of startled silverfry seen in negative, elsewhere exploding in slow tumbling motion to take up station on a hundred different levels around the re-emerging corpses of the two Martians. Sequenced splinters of flashing colour flickered at the corners of attenuated fields in shades of pearl and grey. The overall thrumming subsided and the ship began to talk to itself in more denned syllables. Fluting notes echoed across the platform, interspersed with organ deep pulses of sound.
“This is—” My mind spun back to the narrow trawler cabin, the softly awake spiral of the datacoil, the motes of data swept to the top corner. “This is a datasystem?”
“Well spotted.” Tanya Wardani stalked under the trailing skirts of radiance and pointed up to the pattern of shadow and light gathered around the two corpses. There was a peculiar exultation on her face. “A little more extensive than your average desktop holo, isn’t it. I imagine those two have the primary con. Shame they’re not in any state to use it, but then I also imagine the ship is capable of looking after itself.”
“That depends on what’s coming,” said Vongsavath grimly. “Check out the upper screens. The grey background.”
I followed her arm. High up, near the curve of the dome a pearl surface ten metres across displayed a milky version of the starscape now dimmed by the shield outside.
Something moved there, shark-slim and angular against the stars.
“What the f*ck is that?” asked Deprez.
“Can’t you guess?” Wardani was almost shivering with the strength of whatever was slopping around inside her. She stood centre stage to us all. “Look up. Listen to the ship. She’s telling you what it is.”
The Martian datasystem was still talking, in no language anyone was equipped to understand, but with an urgency that required no translator. The splintered lights—technoglyph numerals jolted through me, almost as knowledge; it’s a countdown—flashed over like digit counters tracking a missile. Querulous shrieks fluted up and down an unhuman scale.
“Incoming,” said Vongsavath, hypnotised. “We’re getting ready to engage with something out there. Automated battle systems.”
The Nagini—
I whipped around.
“Schneider,” I bellowed.
But Schneider was gone.
“Deprez,” I yelled it back over my shoulder, already on my way across the platform. “Jiang. He’s going for the Nagini.”
The ninja was with me by the time I reached the downward spiral pipe, Deprez a couple of steps behind. Both men hefted Sunjets, stocks folded back for easy handling. At the bottom of the pipe I thought I heard the clatter of someone falling, and a shriek of pain. I felt a brief snarl of wolf go through me.
Prey!
We ran, slithering and stumbling on the steep downward incline until we hit bottom and the empty, cherry-flashed expanse of the first chamber. There was blood smeared on the floor where Schneider had fallen. I knelt beside it and felt my lips draw back from my teeth. I got up and looked at my two companions.
“He won’t be moving that fast. Don’t kill him if you can avoid it. We still need to know about Carrera.”
“Kovacs!!”
It was Hand’s voice from up the pipe, bawling with repressed fury. Deprez dropped me a taut grin. I shook my head and sprinted for the exit to the next chamber.
Hunt!
It isn’t easy running when every cell in your body is trying to shut down and die, but the wolf gene splice and whatever else the Wedge biotechs had thrown into the cocktail rose through the midst of the nausea and snarled down the weariness. The Envoy conditioning rode it upward.
Check functionality.
Thanks, Virginia.
Around us the ship quivered and shook to wakefulness. We ran through corridors that pulsed with sequenced rings of the purple light I’d seen splash off the edge of the gate when it opened. In one chamber, one of the spine-backed machines moved to intercept us, facings awake with technoglyph display and cluttering softly. I fetched up short, smart guns leaping to my hands, Deprez and Jiang flanking me. The impasse held for a long moment and then the machine slouched aside, muttering.
We exchanged glances. Beyond the tortured panting in my chest and the thudding in my temples, I found my mouth had bent itself into a smile.
“Come on.”
A dozen chambers and corridors further on, Schneider proved smarter than I’d expected. As Jiang and I burst into the open of a bubble, Sunjet fire spat and crackled from the far exit. I felt the sting of a near miss across my cheek and then the ninja at my elbow had floored me with a sideways flung arm. The next blast lashed where I had been. Jiang hit, rolled and joined me on the floor, face up, looking at a smouldering cuff with mild distaste.
Deprez slammed to a halt in the shadow of the entrance we’d come through, eye bent to the sighting system of his weapon. The barrage of covering fire he laid down boiled up and down the edges of Schneider’s ambush point and—I narrowed my eyes—did absolutely no damage to the material of the exitway. Jiang rolled under the strafing beam and got a narrower angle on the corridor beyond. He fired once, squinted into the glare and shook his head.
“Gone,” he said, climbing to his feet and offering me his hand.
“I, uh, I, thanks.” I got upright. “Thanks for the push.”
He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn’t even warm.
The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand’s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head cocked.
“…vacs, an… me—… ow.—peat, re… ow…”
“Say. Again?” Jiang, spacing his words.
“—saiiii…—port no…—”
Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.
What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert assault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.
Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini’s drives powering up. The covert assault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang passed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.
A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.
The Nagini’s ultravibe battery firing in a confined space.
I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view, painted bloody from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini’s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.
In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.
I made a sound and he looked up.
“Jiang?”
“This.” He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it’s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. “Is. Jiang. This is.” His fists knotted up. “F*ck.”
At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sniggered at us.