Chapter FORTY-TWO
When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.
“That’s wonderful,” he breathed. “The stuff of epics.”
“Stop that,” I told him.
“No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.”
“Well,” I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. “You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the f*cking thing.”
“You may laugh.” There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. “But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?”
I poured my glass half full of whisky again. “Kemp manages.”
“Oh, that’s politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu—” he snapped his fingers. “Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?”
“Communitarianism.”
“Yes, that.” He shook his head sagely. “That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savour? Where’s the blood and adrenalin?”
I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.
Pity they didn’t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.
I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.
“Plenty of blood out there at the moment,” I observed.
“Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.”
“Thought you would.”
“In less than a year he’d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn’t, his own people would, uh, vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to go quietly.”
“Yes, that’s the problem with voting,” said Roespinoedji judiciously. “Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?”
“Kemp? Yeah, a few times.”
“And what was he like?”
He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same goddamned f*cking conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.
“Tall,” I said. “He was tall.”
“Ah. Well, yes, he would be.”
I turned to look at the boy beside me. “Doesn’t it worry you, Djoko? What’s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?”
He grinned. “I doubt their political assessors are any different to the Cartel’s. Everyone has appetites. And besides. With what you’ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul.” His look sharpened. “Allowing that we have dismantled all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is.”
“Relax. I told you, I only ever set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it’d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for.”
“Hmm.” Roespinoedji rolled whisky around in the base of his glass. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. “Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?”
I shrugged. “What if? Hand could never risk assuming he’d found all of them, too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff.”
“Yes. Well, you’re the Envoy.” He prodded at the slim hand-sized slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. “And you’re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognise this broadcast?”
“Trust me.” Just the words brought a grin to my lips. “State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission’s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition.”
Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. “Alright. Enough. We’ve got an agreement. Don’t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling.”
“You’d just better not be f*cking with me,” I said amiably.
“I’m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy,” he sniffed. “In Landfall, at any rate.”
“And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek.”
“That’s a strange attitude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world.”
“Figure of speech. A good technician. Don’t go cutting corners on me.”
“Well, if you don’t trust me,” he said huffily, “why don’t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you?”
“She’ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a f*ck-up.”
“I’m sure she does. She seems very competent.”
I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every manoeuvre and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse, and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.
“Yes. She is.”
“You know,” Roespinoedji chuckled. “Last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked.”
I shivered again. “Yeah. Wasn’t easy.”
We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji’s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like woodsmoke from someone else’s beach barbecue.
“Did you give it a name?” Roespinoedji wondered finally. “This starship.”
“No, there wasn’t really that kind of time.”
“So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?”
I shrugged.
“The Wardani?”
“Ah.” He looked at me shrewdly. “And would she like that?”
I picked up my glass and drained it.
“How the f*ck would I know?”
She’d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knock-off, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji’s place, she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out.
I didn’t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it any more and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.
Roespinoedji was sold.
The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji’s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instill fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.
“It’s cool,” she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. “Why don’t you go talk to Tanya. I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.”
“To me?”
The pilot shrugged impatiently. “To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.”
“Is she still in her room?”
“She went out.” Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that constituted Dig 27’s town centre. “Go. I’ll watch these guys.”
I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the fa?ade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.
She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn’t let go of.
“You following me?”
“Not intentionally,” I lied. “Sleep well?”
She shook her head. “I can still hear Sutjiadi.”
“Yeah.”
When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. “You going in here?”
“Are you f*cking—? No. I only stopped to…” and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.
I peered at the glyphs. “Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?”
She almost smiled.
“No.” She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. “It’s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It’s sort of a grafiti as well. It says.” She stopped, shook her head again. “There’s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good shit before you go up in a populated area.”
“You’re winding me up. It doesn’t say that.”
“It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too.” She turned away. “They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell.”
The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.
“I was going to the dighead,” she said. “That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—”
“Sure. I’ll walk with you.”
She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.
“Maybe I should get one of those.”
“Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.”
We plodded up the slope.
“You sure this is going to come off?” she asked.
“What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?”
“I think he’s a f*cking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.”
“Tanya,” I said gently. “It wasn’t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji’s getting the deal of the millennium, and he knows it. He’s solid on this one, believe me.”
“Well. You’re the Envoy.”
The café was pretty much as I remembered it, a forlorn-looking herd of moulded chairs and tables gathered in the shade cast by the massive stanchions and struts of the dighead frame. A holomenu fluoresced weakly overhead, and a muted Lapinee playlist seeped into the air from speakers hung on the structure. Martian artefacts stood about the place in no particular pattern that I could discern. We were the only customers.
A terminally bored waiter sloped out of hiding somewhere and stood at our table, looking resentful. I glanced up at the menu then back at Wardani. She shook her head.
“Just water,” she said. “And cigarettes, if you’ve got them.”
“Site Sevens or Will to Victory?”
She grimaced. “Site Sevens.”
The waiter looked at me, obviously hoping I wasn’t going to spoil his day and order some food.
“Got coffee?”
He nodded.
“Bring me some. Black, with whisky in it.”
He trudged away. I raised an eyebrow at Wardani behind his back.
“Leave him alone. Can’t be much fun working here.”
“Could be worse. He could be a conscript. Besides,” I gestured around me at the artefacts. “Look at the décor. What more could you want?”
A wan smile.
“Takeshi.” She hunched forward over the table. “When you get the virtual gear installed. I, uh, I’m not going with you.”
I nodded. Been expecting this.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologising to me for?”
“You, uh. You’ve done a lot for me in the last couple of months. You got me out of the camp—”
“We pulled you out of the camp because we needed you. Remember.”
“I was angry when I said that. Not with you, but—”
“Yeah, with me. Me, Schneider, the whole f*cking world in a uniform.” I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. And you were right. We got you out because we needed you. You don’t owe me anything.”
She studied her hands where they lay in her lap.
“You helped put me back together again, Takeshi. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but that Envoy recovery shit works. I’m getting better. Slowly, but it’s off that base.”
“That’s good.” I hesitated, then made myself say it. “Fact remains, I did it because I needed you. Part of the rescue package; there was no point in getting you out of the camp if we left half your soul behind.”
Her mouth twitched. “Soul?”
“Sorry, figure of speech. Too much time hanging around Hand. Look, I’ve got no problem with you bailing out. I’m kind of curious to know why, is all.”
The waiter toiled back into view at that point, and we quietened. He laid out the drinks and the cigarettes. Tanya Wardani slit the pack and offered me one across the table. I shook my head.
“I’m quitting. Those things’ll kill you.”
She laughed almost silently and fed herself one from the pack. Smoke curled up as she touched the ignition patch. The waiter left. I sipped at my whisky coffee and was pleasantly surprised. Wardani plumed smoke up into the dighead frame space.
“Why am I staying?”
“Why are you staying?”
She looked at the table top. “I can’t leave now, Takeshi. Sooner or later, what we found out there is going to get into the public domain. They’ll open the gate again. Or take an IP cruiser out there. Or both.”
“Yeah, sooner or later. But right now there’s a war in the way.”
“I can wait.”
“Why not wait on Latimer? It’s a lot safer there.”
“I can’t. You said yourself, transit time in the ‘Chandra has got to be eleven years, minimum. That’s full acceleration, without any course correction Ameli might have to do. Who knows what’s going to have happened back here in the next eleven years?”
“The war might have ended, for one thing.”
“The war might be over next year, Takeshi. Then Roespinoedji’s going to move on his investment, and when that happens, I want to be here.”
“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trust him any more than Hand. Now you want to work for him?”
“We, uh,” she looked at her hands again. “We talked about it this morning. He’s willing to hide me until things have calmed down. Get me a new sleeve.” She smiled a little sheepishly. “Guild Masters are thin on the ground since the war kicked in. I guess I’m part of his investment.”
“Guess so.” Even while the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t work out why I was trying so hard to talk her out of this. “You know that won’t help much if the Wedge come looking for you, don’t you?”
“Is that likely?”
“It could ha—” I sighed. “No, not really. Carrera’s probably backed up somewhere in a sneak station, but it’ll be a while before they realise that he’s dead. While longer before they sort the authorisation to sleeve the back-up copy. And even if he does get out to Dangrek, there’s nobody left to tell him what happened there.”
She shivered and looked away.
“It had to be done, Tanya. We had to cover our traces. You of all people should know that.”
“What?” Her eyes flicked back in my direction.
“I said. You of all people should know that.” I kept her gaze. “It’s what you did last time around. Isn’t it.”
She looked away again, convulsively. Smoke curled up off her cigarette and was snatched away by the breeze. I leaned into the silence between us.
“It doesn’t much matter now. You don’t have the skills to sink us between here and Latimer, and once we’re there you’ll never see me again. Would. Never have seen me again. And now you’re not coming with us. But like I said, I’m curious.”
She moved her arm as if it wasn’t connected to her, drew on the cigarette, exhaled mechanically. Her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.
“How long have you known?”
“Known?” I thought about it. “Honestly, I think I’ve known from the day we pulled you out of the camp. Nothing I could lock down, but I knew there was a problem. Someone tried to bust you out before we came. The camp commandant let that slip, in between fits of drooling.”
“Sounds unusually animated, for him.” She drew more smoke, hissed it out between her teeth.
“Yeah, well. Then of course there were your friends down on the rec deck at Mandrake. Now that one I really should have spotted on the launch pad. I mean, it’s only the oldest whore’s trick in the book. Lead the mark up a darkened alley by his dick, and hand him over to your pimp.”
She flinched. I forced a grin.
“Sorry. Figure of speech. I just feel kind of stupid. Tell me, was that gun-to-your-head stuff just tinsel, or were they serious?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “They were revolutionary guard cadres. Kemp’s hard men. They took out Deng when he came sniffing around after them. Really dead, stack torched and body sold off for spares. They told me that while we were waiting for you. Maybe to scare me, I don’t know. They probably would have shot me sooner than let me go again.”
“Yeah, they convinced the f*ck out of me as well. But you still called them in, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said it to herself, as if discovering the truth for the first time. “I did.”
“Care to tell me why?”
She made a tiny motion, something that might have been her head shaking, or just a shiver.
“OK. Want to tell me how?”
She got herself back together, looked at me. “Coded signal. I set it up while you and Jan were out casing Mandrake. Told them to wait on my signal, then placed a call from my room in the tower when I was sure we were definitely going to Dangrek.” A smile crossed her face, but her voice could have been a machine’s. “I ordered underwear. From a catalogue. Locational code in the numbers. Basic stuff.”
I nodded. “Were you always a Kempist?”
She shifted impatiently. “I’m not from here, Kovacs. I don’t have any political, I don’t have any right to a political stance here.” She shot me an angry look. “But for Christ’s sake, Kovacs. It’s their f*cking planet, isn’t it?”
“That sounds pretty much like a political stance to me.”
“Yeah, must be really nice not to have any beliefs.” She smoked some more, and I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. “I envy you your smug sanctimonious f*cking detachment.”
“Well, it’s not hard to come by, Tanya.” I tried to curb the defensiveness in my voice. “Try working local military adviser to Joshua Kemp while Indigo City comes apart in civil riots around you. Remember those cuddly little inhib systems Carrera unloaded on us? First time I saw those in use on Sanction IV? Kemp’s guardsmen were using them on protesting artefact merchants in Indigo City, a year before the war kicked in. Maxed up, continuous discharge. No mercy for the exploitative classes. You get pretty detached after the first few street cleanups.”
“So you changed sides.” It was the same scorn I’d heard in her voice that night in the bar, the night she drove Schneider away.
“Well, not immediately. I thought about assassinating Kemp for a while, but it didn’t seem worth it. Some family member would have stepped in, some f*cking cadre. And by then, the war was looking pretty meltable anyway. And like Quell says, these things need to run their hormonal course.”
“Is that how you survive it?” she whispered.
“Tanya. I have been trying to leave ever since.”
“I,” she shuddered. “I’ve watched you, Kovacs. I watched you in Landfall, in that firefight at the promoter’s offices, in the Mandrake Tower, the beach at Dangrek with your own men. I, I envied you what you have. How you live with yourself.”
I took brief refuge in my whisky coffee. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I can’t.” A helpless, fending gesture. “I can’t get them out of my head. Dhasanapongsakul, Aribowo, the rest of them. Most of them, I didn’t even see die, but they. Keep.” She swallowed hard. “How did you know?”
“You want to give me a cigarette now?”
She handed over the pack, wordlessly. I busied myself with lighting and inhaling, to no noticeable benefit. My system was so bombed on damage and Roespinoedji’s drugs, I would have been amazed if there had been. It was the thin comfort of habit, not much more.
“Envoy intuition doesn’t work like that,” I said slowly. “Like I said, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t want to take it on board. You uh, you make a good impression, Tanya Wardani. At some level, I didn’t want to believe it was you. Even when you sabotaged the hold—”
She started. “Vongsavath said—”
“Yeah, I know. She still thinks it was Schneider. I haven’t told her any different. I was pretty much convinced it was Schneider myself after he ran out on us. Like I said, I didn’t want to think it might be you. When the Schneider angle showed up, I went after it like a heatseeker. There was a moment in the docking bay when I worked him out. You know what I felt? I was relieved. I had my solution and I didn’t have to think about who else might be involved any more. So much for detachment, huh.”
She said nothing.
“But there were a whole stack of reasons why Schneider couldn’t be the whole story. And the Envoy conditioning just went on racking them up ‘til there was too much to ignore any more.”
“Such as?”
“Such as this.” I reached into a pocket and shook out a portable datastack. The membrane settled on the table and motes of light evolved in the projected datacoil. “Clean that space off for me.”
She looked at me curiously, then leaned forward and lobbed the display motes up to the top left-hand corner of the coil. The gesture echoed back in my head, the hours of watching her work in the screens of her own monitors. I nodded and smiled.
“Interesting habit. Most of us flatten down to the surface. More final, more satisfying I guess. But you’re different. You tidy upward.”
“Wycinski. It’s his.”
“That where you picked it up?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Probably.”
“You’re not Wycinski, are you?”
It startled a short laugh out of her. “No, I’m not. I worked with him at Bradbury, and on Nkrumah’s Land, but I’m half his age. Why would you think something like that?”
“Nothing. Just crossed my mind. You know, that cybersex virtuality. There was a lot of male tendency in what you did to yourself. Just wondered, you know. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a man?”
She smiled at me. “Wrong, Takeshi. Wrong way round. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a woman.”
For just a moment, something warm sparked between us, already fading as it came into being. Her smile washed away.
“So you were saying?”
I pointed at the datacoil. “That’s the pattern you leave after shutdown. That’s the pattern you left in the cabin datacoil on board the trawler. Presumably after you slammed the gate on Dhasanapongsakul and his colleagues, after you took out the two on the trawler and dumped them in the nets. I saw it the morning after the party. Didn’t notice at the time, but like I said that’s Envoys for you. Just go on acquiring little scraps of data until it means something.”
She was staring intently at the datacoil, but I still spotted the tremor go through her when I said Dhasanapongsakul’s name.
“There were other scraps, once I started to look. The corrosion grenades in the hold. Sure, it took Schneider to shut down the onboard monitors on the Nagini, but you were f*cking him. Old flame, in fact. I don’t suppose you had any harder time talking him into it than you did in getting me down to the rec deck at Mandrake. It didn’t fit at first, because you were pushing so hard to get the claim buoy aboard. Why go to the trouble of trying to put the buoys out of commission in the first place, then work so hard to get the remaining one placed.”
She nodded jerkily. Most of her was still dealing with Dhasanapongsakul. I was talking into a vacuum.
“Didn’t make sense, that is, until I thought about what else had been put out of commission. Not the buoys. The ID&A sets. You trashed them all. Because that way no one was going to be able to put Dhasanapongsakul and the rest into virtual and find out what had happened to them. Of course, eventually we’d get them back to Landfall and find out. But then. You didn’t plan for us to make it back, did you?”
That got her back to me. A haggard stare across wreathed smoke.
“You know when I worked most of this out?” I sucked in my own smoke hard. “On the swim back to the gate. See, I was pretty much convinced it’d be closed by the time I got there. Wasn’t quite sure why I thought that at first, but it sort of fell into place. They’d gone through the gate, and the gate had closed on them. Why would that happen, and how did poor old Dhasanapongsakul end up on the wrong side wearing a T-shirt. Then I remembered the waterfall.”
She blinked.
“The waterfall?”
“Yeah, any normal human being, post-coital, would have shoved me in the back into that pool and then laughed. We both would have. Instead, you started crying.” I examined the end of my cigarette as if it interested me. “You stood at the gate with Dhasanapongsakul, and you pushed him through. And then you slammed it shut. It doesn’t take two hours to shut that gate, does it, Tanya?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Were you already thinking you might have to do the same thing to me? Then, at the waterfall?”
“I.” She shook her head. “Don’t know.”
“How did you kill the two on the trawler?”
“Stunner. Then the nets. They drowned before they woke up. I.” She cleared her throat. “I pulled them up again later, I was going to, I don’t know, bury them somewhere. Maybe even wait a few days and drag them to the gate, try to open it so I could dump them through as well. I panicked. I couldn’t stand to be there, wondering if Aribowo and Weng might find some way to open the gate again before their air ran out.”
She looked at me defiantly.
“I didn’t really believe that. I’m an archaeologue, I know how…” She was silent for a few moments. “I couldn’t even have opened it again myself in time to save them. It was just. The gate. What it meant. Sitting there on the trawler, knowing they were just the other side of that. Thing, suffocating. Millions of kilometres away in the sky above my head and still right there in the cavern. So close. Like something huge, waiting for me.”
I nodded. Back on the beach at Dangrek, I’d told Wardani and Vongsavath about the corpses I’d found sealed in the substance of the Martian vessel while Carrera and I hunted each other across the hull. But I never told either of them about my last half hour inside the ship, the things I’d seen and heard as I stumbled back out to the echoing desolation of the docking bay with Carrera’s impeller frame on my shoulders, the things I’d felt swimming beside me all the way back to the gate. After a while, my vision had narrowed down to that faint blur of light orbiting out in the blackness, and I didn’t want to look round for fear of what I might see, what might be hunched there, offering me its taloned hand. I just dived for the light, scarcely able to believe it was still there, terrified that at any moment it would slam shut and leave me locked out in the dark.
Tetrameth hallucination, I told myself later, and that was just going to have to do.
“So why didn’t you take the trawler?”
She shook her head again and stubbed out her cigarette.
“I panicked. I was cutting the stacks out of the two in the nets, and I just.” She shivered. “It was like something was staring at me. I dumped them back in the water, threw the stacks out to sea as far as I could. Then I just ran away. Didn’t even try to blow the cavern or cover my tracks. Walked all the way into Sauberville.” Her voice changed in some way I couldn’t define. “I got a ride with this guy in a ground car the last couple of klicks. Young guy with a couple of kids he was bringing back from a grav-gliding trip. I guess they’re all dead now.”
“Yes.”
“I. Sauberville wasn’t far enough. I ran south. I was in the Bootkinaree hinterlands when the Protectorate signed the accords. Cartel forces picked me up from a refugee column. Dumped me in the camp with the rest of them. At the time, it seemed almost like justice.”
She fumbled out a fresh cigarette and fitted it in her mouth. Her gaze slanted my way.
“That make you laugh?”
“No.” I drained my coffee. “Point of interest, though. What you were doing around Bootkinaree? Why not head back for Indigo City? You being a Kempist sympathiser and all.”
She grimaced. “I don’t think the Kempists would have been pleased to see me, Takeshi. I’d just killed their entire expedition. Would have been a little hard to explain.”
“Kempists?”
“Yeah.” There was a gritted amusement in her tone now. “Who’d you think bankrolled that trip? Vacuum gear, drilling and construction equipment, the analogue units and the dataprocessing system for the gate. Come on, Takeshi. We were on the edge of a war. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Who’d you think went in and wiped the gate from the Landfall archive?”
“Like I said,” I muttered. “I didn’t want to think about it. So it was a Kempist gig. So why’d you waste them?”
“I don’t know,” she gestured. “It seemed like. I don’t know, Kovacs.”
“Fair enough.” I crushed out my cigarette, resisted the temptation to take another, then took it anyway. I watched her and waited.
“It.” She stopped. Shook her head. Started again, enunciating with exasperated care. “I thought I was on their side. It made sense. We all agreed. In Kemp’s hands the ship would be a bargaining chip the Cartel couldn’t ignore. It could win the war for us. Bloodlessly.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then we found out it was a warship. Aribowo found a weapons battery up near the prow. Pretty unmistakable. Then another one. I, uh.” She stopped and sipped some water. Cleared her throat again. “They changed. Almost overnight, they all changed. Even Aribowo. She used to be so… It was like possession. Like they’d been taken over by one of those sentiences you see in experia horror flicks. Like something had come through the gate and…”
Another grimace.
“I guess I never knew them all that well after all. The two on the trawler, they were cadres. I didn’t know them at all. But they all went the same way. All talking about what could be done. The necessity of it, the revolutionary need. Vaporise Landfall from orbit. Power up whatever drives the ship had, they were speculating FTL now, talking about taking the war to Latimer. Doing the same thing there. Planetary bombardment. Latimer City, Portausaint, Soufriere. All gone, like Sauberville, until the Protectorate capitulated.”
“Could they have done that?”
“Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.” She shrugged. “Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing f*cking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government channels, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Cant, political theory, all to shore up the use of a planetary massacre machine. And I’d given it to them. Without me, I don’t think they could have got the gate open again. They were just Scratchers. They needed me. They couldn’t get anyone else, the Guild Masters were all already on their way back to Latimer in cryocap liners, way ahead of the game, or holed up in Landfall waiting for their Guild-paid hypercasts to come through. Wang and Aribowo came looking for me in Indigo City. They begged me to help them. And I did.” There was something like a plea in her face as she turned to look at me. “I gave it to them.”
“But you took it away again,” I said gently.
Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.
“Were you planning to do the same to us?” I asked, when she seemed to have calmed. She tried to withdraw her hand, but I held onto it.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said urgently. “These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.”
A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was just surviving.”
“Good enough,” I told her.
We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.
Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.
I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.
“I hope he doesn’t come here,” she muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.”
“Will they let him come?”
She shrugged. “Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the running himself.” She shook her head. “But it’ll kill him. His precious Martians, fighting and dying in cohorts just like humans. Mass graves and planetary wealth condensed into war machines. It tears down everything he wanted to believe about them.”
“Well, predator stock…”
“I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old f*cking song.”
“Same old f*cking universe,” I pointed out gently.
“It’s just…”
“At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. “They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like running from a bomb blast. Like putting your hands out to stop a bullet.”
“And then the hull what, melted?”
She shook her head again, slowly. “I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,” she gestured, “I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.”
I shivered a little, remembering.
“It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,” she went on. “What we saw didn’t come close.”
I grunted. “Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?”
“No.”
“He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.”
She stopped in the street to look at me.
“Look, if it did…”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.”
“It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.”
“Statistically,” she breathed.
“Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?”
“Astronomical.”
“And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.”
“Unless.”
I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.
“That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.”
“We would have seen it,” she said uncertainly. “By now, we would have spotted some of them.”
“Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.”
She laughed, or something very like it.
“You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.”
I built another smile. “No. I’m not Wycinski, either.”
The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.
“Yeah?”
“Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.”
I looked at Wardani and sighed. “Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.”
I pocketed the phone and started down the street again. Wardani followed.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr.I’m-Not-Wycinski?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.”
“Yes.”
The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.
She’d be alright.
It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.
It felt like a scab coming off.
“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.
“Yeah?”
“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”
She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.
“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”
“Right.”
Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.