Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
Tetrameth is one of my favourite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like no, you can’t fly without a grav harness or punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side-effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.
The comedown is no worse than most poisons.
I was starting to feel slightly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail-end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi over-vigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.
“Jiang, hey Jiang. Open your f*cking eyes. Guess where we are.”
He blinked up at me, face curiously child-like.
“Whuhh—”
“Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.” The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades-in-arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. “F*cking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.”
“The Wedge? That’s.” Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. “Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.”
I sat back again, on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.
“They came looking for me.” For all the pretense, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. “You believe that?”
“If you say so.” Sutjiadi propped himself up. “Who else made it out?”
“All of us except Sun.” I gestured. “And she’s retrievable.”
His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. “Back there. Did you. See?”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“They were ghosts,” he said, biting down on the words.
“Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.”
“That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.” Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. “Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?”
I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. “What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.”
She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.
“Good for you.” Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. “So who do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?”
“Take your pick.”
After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity—a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breath this stuff for a living.
Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage between us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.
“At least,” I said at one point, “We know why they left the f*cking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near-miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.”
“I,” said Deprez emphatically, “Do not. Believe. In ghosts.”
“That didn’t seem to bother them.”
“Do you think,” Vongsavath, picking her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide, “all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?”
Wardani shook her head. “If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.”
“I felt,” Sutjiadi swallowed. “They were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilisation far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, any more. Maybe they evolved past that.”
I grunted. “Neat trick, if you can manage it.”
“And we apparently can’t,” said Wardani.
“Maybe we would have, if that kind of thing was left floating around every time we committed mass murder.”
“Kovacs, that’s absurd,” Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. “All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction IV? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.”
“Bravo, Hand.” Vongsavath clapped a handful of slow, sardonic applause. “You should have been a political officer. Just one problem with your muscular humanism there—that second ship wasn’t Martian. Right Mistress Wardani? Totally different config.”
All eyes fixed on the archaeologue, who sat with her head bowed. Finally, she looked up, met my gaze and nodded reluctantly.
“It did not look like any Martian technology I have ever seen or heard of.” She drew a deep breath. “On the evidence I saw. It would appear the Martians were at war with someone else.”
The unease rose from the floor again, winding among us like cold smoke, chilling the conversation to a halt. A tiny premonition of the wake-up call humanity was about to get.
We do not belong out here.
A few centuries we’ve been let out to play on these three dozen worlds the Martians left us but the playground has been empty of adults all that time, and with no supervision there’s just no telling who’s going to come creeping over the fence or what they’ll do to us. Light is fading from the afternoon sky, retreating across distant rooftops, and in the empty streets below it’s suddenly a cold and shadowy neighbourhood.
“This is nonsense,” said Hand. “The Martian domain went down in a colonial revolt, everyone agrees on that. Mistress Wardani, the Guild teaches that.”
“Yeah, Hand.” The scorn in Wardani’s voice was withering. “And why do you think they teach that? Who allocates Guild funding, you blinkered f*ckwit? Who decides what our children will grow up believing?”
“There is evidence—”
“Don’t f*cking talk to me about evidence.” The archaeologue’s wasted face lit with fury. For a moment I thought she was going to physically assault the executive. “You ignorant motherf*cker. What do you know about the Guild? I do this for a living, Hand. Do you want me to tell you how much evidence has been suppressed because it didn’t suit the Protectorate worldview? How many researchers were branded antihuman and ruined, how many projects butchered, all because they wouldn’t ratify the official line? How much shit the appointed Guild Chancellors spurt every time the Protectorate sees fit to give them a funding handjob?”
Hand seemed taken aback by the sudden eruption of rage from this haggard, dying woman. He fumbled. “Statistically, the chances of two starfaring civilisations evolving so close to—”
But it was like walking into the teeth of a gale. Wardani had her own emotional ‘meth shot now. Her voice was a lash.
“Are you mentally defective? Or weren’t you paying attention when we opened the gate? That’s instant matter transmission across interplanetary distance, technology that they left lying around. You think a civilisation like that is going to be limited to a few hundred cubic light years of space? The weaponry we saw in action out there was faster than light. Those ships could both have come from the other side of the f*cking galaxy. How would we know?”
The quality of light shifted as someone opened the bubblefab flap. Glancing away from Wardani’s face for a moment, I saw Tony Loemanako stood in the entrance to the bubblefab, wearing noncom-flashed chameleochrome and trying not to grin.
I raised a hand. “Hello, Tony. Welcome to the hallowed chambers of academic debate. Feel free to ask if you don’t follow any of the technical terms.”
Loemanako gave up trying to hide the grin. “I got a kid back on Latimer wants to be an archaeologue. Says he doesn’t want a profession of violence like his old man.”
“That’s just a stage, Tony. He’ll get over it.”
“Hope so.” Loemanako shifted stiffly, and I saw that under the chameleochrome coveralls, he wore a mobility suit. “Commander wants to see you right away.”
“Just me?”
“No, he said bring anyone who’s awake. I think it’s important.”
Outside the bubblefab, evening had closed the sky down to a luminous grey in the west and thickening darkness in the east. Under it all, Carrera’s camp was a model of ordered activity in the glow of tripod-mounted Angier lamps.
Envoy habit mapped it for me, cold detail floating over and above a tingling warm sense of hearthfire and company against the encroaching night.
Up by the gate, the sentries sat astride their bugs, leaning back and forth and gesturing. The wind carried down shreds of laughter I recognised as Kwok’s, but distance rendered the rest inaudible. Their faceplates were hinged up, but otherwise they were swim-prepped and still armed to the teeth. The other soldiers Loemanako had detailed to back them up stood around a mobile ultravibe cannon in similar casual alertness. Further down the beach, another knot of Wedge uniforms busied themselves with what looked like the components for a blast shield generator. Others moved back and forth from the Angin Chandra’s Virtue to the polalloy cabin and the other bubblefabs, carrying crates that could have been anything. Behind and above the scene, lights gleamed from the bridge of the ‘Chandra and at the loading level, where onboard cranes swung more equipment out of the battlewagon’s belly and down onto the lamplit sand.
“So how come the mob suit?” I asked Loemanako, as he led us down towards the unloading area.
He shrugged. “Cable batteries at Rayong. Our tinsel systems went down at a bad time. Got my left leg, hipbone, ribs. Some of the left arm.”
“Shit. You have all the luck, Tony.”
“Ah, it’s not so bad. Just taking a f*ck of a long time to heal right. Doc says the cables were coated with some kind of carcinogenic, and it’s f*cking up the rapid regrowth.” He grimaced. “Been like this for three weeks now. Real drag.”
“Well, thanks for coming out to us. Especially in that state.”
“No worries. Easier getting about in vac than here anyway. Once you’re wearing the mob suit, polalloy’s just another layer.”
“I guess.”
Carrera was waiting below the ‘Chandra’s loading hatch, dressed in the same field coveralls he’d worn earlier and talking to a small, similarly-attired group of ranking officers. A couple of noncoms were busy with mounted equipment up on the edge of the hatch. About halfway between the ‘Chandra and the blast shield detail, a ragged-looking individual in a stained uniform perched on a powered-down loadlifter, staring at us out of bleary eyes. When I stared back, he laughed and shook his head convulsively. One hand lifted to rub viciously at the back of his neck and his mouth gaped open as if someone had just drenched him with a bucket of cold water. His face twitched in tiny spasms that I recognised. Wirehead tremors.
Maybe he saw the grimace pass across my face.
“Oh, yeah, look that way,” he snarled. “You’re not so smart, not so f*cking smart. Got you for antihumanism, got you all filed away, heard you all and your counter-Cartel sentiments, how do you like—”
“Shut up, Lamont.” There wasn’t much volume in Loemanako’s voice, but the wirehead jerked as if he’d just been jacked in. His eyes slipped around in their sockets alarmingly, and he cowered. At my side, Loemanako sneered.
“Political officer,” he said, and toed some sand in the shivering wreck of a human’s direction. “All the f*cking same. All mouth.”
“You seem to have this one leashed.”
“Yeah, well.” Loemanako grinned. “You’d be amazed how quickly these political guys lose interest in their job once they’ve been socketed up and plugged in a few times. We haven’t had a Correct Thought lecture all month, and the personal files, well, I’ve read ‘em and our own mothers couldn’t have written nicer things about us. Amazing how all that political dogma just sort of fades away. Isn’t that right, Lamont?”
The political officer cringed away from Loemanako. Tears leaked into his eyes.
“Works better than the beatings used to,” said the noncom, looking at Lamont dispassionately. “You know, with Phibun and, what was that other shit-mouthed little turd called?”
“Portillo,” I said absently.
“Yeah, him. See you could never be sure if he was really beaten or if he’d come back at you when he’d licked his wounds a bit. We don’t have that problem any more. Think it’s the shame that does it. Once you’ve cut the socket and shown them how to hook up, they do it to themselves. And then, when you take it away… Works like magic. I’ve seen old Lamont here break his nails trying to get the interface cables out of a locked kitpack.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone,” said Tanya Wardani unevenly. “Can’t you see he’s already broken.”
Loemanako shot her a curious glance.
“Civilian?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Pretty much. She’s, uh, on secondment.”
“Well, that can work sometimes.”
Carrera seemed to have finished his briefing as we approached and the surrounding officers were beginning to disperse. He nodded acknowledgement at Loemanako.
“Thank you, sergeant. Did I see Lamont giving you some grief up there?”
The noncom grinned wolfishly. “Nothing he didn’t regret, sir. Think maybe it’s time he was deprived again, though.”
“I’ll give that some thought, sergeant.”
“Yes sir.”
“Meanwhile.” Carrera shifted his focus. “Lieutenant Kovacs, there are a few—”
“Just a moment, commander.” It was Hand’s voice, remarkably poised and polished, given the state he must be in.
Carrera paused.
“Yes?”
“I’m sure you’re aware of who I am, commander. As I am aware of the intrigues in Landfall that have led to your being here. You may not, however, be aware of the extent to which you have been deceived by those who sent you.”
Carrera met my gaze and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.
“No, you’re mistaken,” said the Wedge commander politely. “I am quite well informed of the extent to which your Mandrake colleagues have been economical with the truth. To be honest, I expected no less.”
I heard the silence as Hand’s exec training stumbled. It was almost worth a grin.
“In any case,” Carrera went on, “The issue of objective truth doesn’t much concern me here. I have been paid.”
“Less than you could have been.” Hand rallied with admirable speed. “My business here is authorised at Cartel level.”
“Not any more. Your grubby little friends have sold you out, Hand.”
“Then that was their error, commander. There seems no reason for you to share in it. Believe me, I have no desire for retribution to fall where it is not deserved.”
Carrera smiled faintly. “Are you threatening me?”
“There is no need to view things in such—”
“I asked if you were threatening me,” The Wedge commander’s tone was mild. “I’d appreciate a straight yes or no.”
Hand sighed. “Let us just say that there are forces I may invoke which my colleagues have not considered, or at least not assessed correctly.”
“Oh, yes. I forgot, you are a believer.” Carrera seemed fascinated by the man in front of him. “A hougan. You believe that. Spiritual powers? Can be hired in much the same way as soldiers.”
Beside me, Loemanako sniggered.
Hand sighed again. “Commander, what I believe is that we are both civilised men and—”
The blaster tore through him.
Carrera must have set it for diffuse beam—you don’t usually get as much damage as that from the little ones and the thing in the Wedge commander’s hand was an ultra compact. A hint of bulk inside the closed fist, a fish-tailed snap-out projector between his second and third knuckle, spare heat, the Envoy in me noticed, still dissipating from the discharge end in visible waves.
No recoil, no visible flash, and no punch backwards where it hit. The crackle snarled past my ears and Hand stood there blinking with a smoking hole in his guts. Then he must have caught the stench of his own seared intestines and, looking down, he made a high-pitched hooting noise that was as much panic as pain.
The ultra compacts take a while to recharge, but I didn’t need peripheral vision to tell me jumping Carrera would be a mistake. Noncoms on the loading deck above, Loemanako beside me and the little knot of Wedge officers hadn’t dispersed at all—they’d just fanned out and given us room to walk into the set-up.
Neat. Very neat.
Hand staggered, still wailing, and sat down hard on his backside in the sand. Some brutal part of me wanted to laugh at him. His hands pawed the air close to the gaping wound.
I know that feeling, some other part of me recalled, surprised into brief compassion. It hurts, but you don’t know if you dare touch it.
“Mistaken again,” said Carrera to the ripped open exec at his feet. His tone hadn’t shifted since the shooting. “I am not a civilised man, Hand, I’m a soldier. A professional savage, and I’m on hire to men just like you. I wouldn’t like to say what that makes you. Except out of fashion back at the Mandrake Tower, that is.”
The noise Hand was making shaped towards a conventional scream. Carrera turned to look at me.
“Oh, you can relax Kovacs. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to do that before now.”
I manufactured a shrug. “Once or twice. I probably would have got around to it.”
“Well, now you don’t have to.”
On the ground, Hand twisted and propped himself. Something that might have been words emerged from his agony. At the edge of my vision, a couple of figures moved towards him: peripheral scan, still squeezed to aching point by the adrenalin surge, identified Sutjiadi and—well, well—Tanya Wardani.
Carrera waved them back.
“No, there’s no need for that.”
Hand was definitely speaking now, a ruptured hissing of syllables that weren’t any language I knew or, except once, had heard. His left hand was raised towards Carrera, fingers splayed. I crouched to his level, oddly moved by the contorted strength on his face.
“What’s this?” The Wedge commander leaned closer. “What’s he saying?”
I sat back on my heels. “I think you’re being cursed.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s not unreasonable under the circumstances. Still.” Carrera swung a long, heavy kick into the exec’s side. Hand’s incantation shredded apart in a scream and he rolled into a foetal ball. “No reason why we have to listen to it either. Sergeant.”
Loemanako stepped forward. “Sir.”
“Your knife please.”
“Yes, sir.”
Give Carrera credit—I’d never seen him ask any man in his command to carry out work he wouldn’t do himself. He took the vibroknife from Loemanako, activated it and kicked Hand again, stamping him onto his belly in the sand. The exec’s screams blurred into coughing and whooping sucked breath. Carrera knelt across his back and started cutting.
Hand’s muffled shrieking scaled abruptly up as he felt the blade enter his flesh, and then stopped dead as Carrera sliced his spinal column through.
“Better,” muttered the Wedge commander.
He made the second incision at the base of the skull, a lot more elegantly than I had back in the Landfall promoter’s office, and dug out the section of severed spine. Then he powered off the knife, wiped it carefully on Hand’s clothing and got up. He handed knife and spinal segment to Loemanako with a nod.
“Thank you, sergeant. Get that to Hammad, tell him not to lose it. We just earnt ourselves a bonus.”
“Yes, sir.” Loemanako looked at the faces around us. “And, uh…?”
“Oh, yes.” Carrera raised one hand. His face seemed suddenly tired. “That.”
His hand fell like something discarded.
From the loading deck above I heard the discharge, a muffled crump followed by a chitinous rustling. I looked up and saw what looked like a swarm of crippled nanocopters tumbling down through the air.
I made the intuitive leap to what was going to happen with a curious detachment, a lack of combat reflex that must have had its roots in the mingled radiation sickness and tetrameth comedown. I just had time to look at Sutjiadi. He caught my eye and his mouth twitched. He knew as well as I did. As well as if there’d been a scarlet decal pulsing across the screen of our vision.
Game—
Then it was raining spiders.
Not really, but it looked that way. They’d fired the crowd control mortar almost straight up, a low-power crimped load for limited dispersal. The grey fist-sized inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty metres. The ones at the nearest edge glanced off the curving side of the battlewagon’s hull before they hit the sand, skidding and flailing for purchase with a minute intensity that I later recalled almost with amusement. The others bedded directly in puffs of turquoise sand and scuttled up out of the tiny craters they’d made like the tiny jewelled crabs in Tanya Wardani’s tropical paradise virtuality.
They fell in thousands.
Game—
They dropped on our heads and shoulders, soft as children’s cradle toys, and clung.
They scuttled towards us across the sand and scrambled up our legs.
They endured batting and shaking and clambered on undeterred.
The ones Sutjiadi and the others tore loose and flung away landed in a whirl of limbs and scuttled back unharmed.
They crouched knowledgeably above nerve points and plunged filament-thin tendril fangs through clothing and skin.
Game—
They bit in.
—Over.