Broken Angels

CHAPTER ONE

I first met Jan Schneider in a Protectorate orbital hospital three hundred kilometres above the ragged clouds of Sanction IV and in a lot of pain. Technically there wasn’t supposed to be a Protectorate presence anywhere in the Sanction system—what was left of planetary government was insisting loudly from its bunkers that this was an internal matter, and local corporate interests had tacitly agreed to sign along that particular dotted line for the time being.

Accordingly, the Protectorate vessels that had been hanging around the system since Joshua Kemp raised his revolutionary standard in Indigo City had had their recognition codes altered, in effect being bought out on long-term lease by various of the corporations involved, and then reloaned to the embattled government as part of the—tax deductible—local development fund. Those that were not pulled out of the sky by Kemp’s unexpectedly efficient second-hand marauder bombs would be sold back to the Protectorate, lease unexpired, and any net losses once again written off to tax. Clean hands all round. In the meantime, any senior personnel injured fighting against Kemp’s forces got shuttled out of harm’s way, and this had been my major consideration when choosing sides. It had the look of a messy war.

The shuttle offloaded us directly onto the hospital’s hangar deck, using a device not unlike a massive ammunition feed belt to dump the dozens of capsule stretchers with what felt like unceremonious haste. I could hear the shrill whine of the ship’s engines still dying away as we rattled and clanked our way out over the wing and down onto the deck, and when they cracked open my capsule the air in the hangar burnt my lungs with the chill of recently evacuated hard space. An instant layer of ice crystals formed on everything, including my face.

“You!” It was a woman’s voice, harsh with stress. “Are you in pain?”

I blinked some of the ice out of my eyes and looked down at my blood-caked battledress.

“Take a wild guess,” I croaked.

“Medic! Endorphin boost and GP anti-viral here.” She bent over me again and I felt gloved fingers touch my head at the same time as the cold stab of the hypospray into my neck. The pain ebbed drastically. “Are you from the Evenfall front?”

“No,” I managed weakly. “Northern Rim assault. Why, what happened at Evenfall?”

“Some fucking terminal buttonhead just called in a tactical nuclear strike.” There was a cold rage chained in the doctor’s voice. Her hands moved down my body, assessing damage. “No radiation trauma, then. What about chemicals?”

I tilted my head fractionally at my lapel. “Exposure meter. Should tell you. That.”

“It’s gone,” she snapped. “Along with most of that shoulder.”

“Oh.” I mustered words. “Think I’m clean. Can’t you do a cell scan?”

“Not here, no. The cellular level scanners are built into the ward decks. Maybe when we can clear some space for you all up there, we’ll get round to it.” The hands left me. “Where’s your bar code?”

“Left temple.”

Someone wiped blood away from the designated area and I vaguely felt the sweep of the laser scan across my face. A machine chirped approval, and I was left alone. Processed.

For a while I just lay there, content to let the endorphin booster relieve me of both pain and consciousness, all with the suave alacrity of a butler taking a hat and coat. A small part of me was wondering whether the body I was wearing was going to be salvageable, or if I’d have to be re-sleeved. I knew that Carrera’s Wedge maintained a handful of small clone banks for its so-called indispensable staff, and as one of only five ex-Envoys soldiering for Carrera, I definitely numbered among that particular elite. Unfortunately, indispensability is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gets you elite medical treatment, up to and including total body replacement. On the downside, the only purpose of said treatment is to throw you back into the fray at the earliest possible opportunity. A plankton-standard grunt whose body was damaged beyond repair would just get his cortical stack excised from its snug little housing at the top of the spinal column then slung into a storage canister, where it would probably stay until the whole war was over. Not an ideal exit, and despite the Wedge’s reputation for looking after their own there was no actual guarantee of re-sleeving, but at times in the screaming chaos of the last few months that step into stored oblivion had seemed almost infinitely desirable.

“Colonel. Hey, colonel.”

I wasn’t sure if the Envoy conditioning was keeping me awake, or if the voice at my side had nagged me back to consciousness again. I rolled my head sluggishly to see who was speaking.

It seemed we were still in the hangar. Lying on the stretcher beside me was a muscular-looking young man with a shock of wiry black hair and a shrewd intelligence in his features that even the dazed expression of the endorphin hit could not mask. He was wearing a Wedge battledress like mine, but it didn’t fit him very well and the holes in it didn’t seem to correspond with the holes in him. At his left temple, where the bar code should have been, there was a convenient blaster burn.

“You talking to me?”

“Yes sir.” He propped himself up on one elbow. They must have dosed him with a lot less than me. “Looks like we’ve really got Kemp on the run down there, doesn’t it?”

“That’s an interesting point of view.” Visions of 391 platoon being cut to shreds around me cascaded briefly through my head. “Where do you think he’s going to run to? Bearing in mind this is his planet, I mean.”

“Uh, I thought—”

“I wouldn’t advise that, soldier. Didn’t you read your terms of enlistment? Now shut up and save your breath. You’re going to need it.”

“Uh, yes sir.” He was gaping a little, and from the sound of heads turned on nearby stretchers he wasn’t the only one surprised to hear a Carrera’s Wedge officer talking this way. Sanction IV, in common with most wars, had stirred up some heavy-duty feelings.

“And another thing.”

“Colonel?”

“This is a lieutenant’s uniform. And Wedge command has no rank of colonel. Try to remember that.”

Then a freak wave of pain swept in from some mutilated part of my body, dodged through the grasp of the endorphin bouncers posted at the door of my brain and started hysterically shrilling its damage report to anyone who’d listen. The smile I had pinned to my face melted away the way the cityscape must have done at Evenfall, and I abruptly lost interest in anything except screaming.

Water was lapping gently somewhere just below me when I next woke up, and gentle sunlight warmed my face and arms. Someone must have removed the shrapnel-shredded remains of my combat jacket and left me with the sleeveless Wedge T-shirt. I moved one hand and my fingertips brushed age-smoothed wooden boards, also warm. The sunlight made dancing patterns on the insides of my eyelids.

There was no pain.

I sat up, feeling better than I had in months. I was stretched out on a small, simply-made jetty that extended a dozen metres or so out into what appeared to be a fjord or sea loch. Low, rounded mountains bounded the water on either side and fluffy white clouds scudded unconcernedly overhead. Further out in the loch a family of seals poked their heads above the water and regarded me gravely.

My body was the same Afro-Caribbean combat sleeve I’d been wearing on the Northern rim assault, undamaged and unscarred.

So.

Footsteps scraped on the boards behind me. I jerked my head sideways, hands lifting reflexively into an embryonic guard. Way behind the reflex came the confirming thought that in the real world no one could have got that close without my sleeve’s proximity sense kicking in.

“Takeshi Kovacs,” said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic “ch” at the end of the name correct. “Welcome to the recuperation stack.”

“Very nice.” I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. “Am I still aboard the hospital?”

The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. “Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.”

I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. “And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“How did I guess?”

“Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—”

“Skip it. I was being rhetorical.” I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

“What ratio are you running all this on?”

“Real time equivalence,” said the woman promptly. “Though I can speed it up if you prefer.”

The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was going to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.

“There is accommodation,” said the woman, pointing, “for your use. Please request modifications if you would like them.”

I followed the line of her arm to where a glass and wood two-storey structure stood beneath gull-winged eaves on the edge of the long shingle beach.

“Looks fine.” Vague tendrils of sexual interest squirmed around in me. “Are you supposed to be my interpersonal ideal?”

The woman shook her head again. “I am an intra-format service construct for Wedge One Systems Overview, based physically on Lieutenant Colonel Lucia Mataran of Protectorate High Command.”

“With that hair? You’re kidding me.”

“I have latitudes of discretion. Do you wish me to generate an interpersonal ideal for you?”

Like the offer of a high-ratio format, it was tempting. But after six weeks in the company of the Wedge’s boisterous do-or-die commandos, what I wanted more than anything was to be alone for a while.

“I’ll think about it. Is there anything else?”

“You have a recorded briefing from Isaac Carrera. Do you wish it stored at the house?”

“No. Play it here. I’ll call you if I need anything else.”

“As you wish.” The construct inclined her head, and snapped out of existence. In her place, a male figure in the Wedge’s black dress uniform shaded in. Close-cropped black hair seasoned with grey, a lined patrician face whose dark eyes and weathered features were somehow both hard and understanding, and beneath the uniform the body of an officer whose seniority had not removed him from the battlefield. Isaac Carrera, decorated ex-Vacuum Command captain and subsequently founder of the most feared mercenary force in the Protectorate. An exemplary soldier, commander, and tactician. Occasionally, when he had no other choice, a competent politician.

“Hello, Lieutenant Kovacs. Sorry this is only a recording, but Evenfall has left us in a bad situation and there wasn’t time to set up a link. The medical report says your sleeve can be repaired in about ten days, so we’re not going to go for a clone-bank option here. I want you back on the Northern Rim as soon as possible, but the truth is, we’ve been fought to a standstill there for the moment and they can live without you for a couple of weeks. There’s a status update appended to this recording, including the losses sustained in the last assault. I’d like you to look it over while you’re in virtual, set that famous Envoy intuition of yours to work. God knows, we need some fresh ideas up there. In a general context, acquisition of the Rim territories will provide one of the nine major objectives necessary to bring this conflict…”

I was already in motion, walking the length of the jetty and then up the sloping shore towards the nearest hills. The sky beyond was tumbled cloud but not dark enough for there to be a storm in the offing. It looked as if there would be a great view of the whole loch if I climbed high enough.

Behind me, Carrera’s voice faded on the wind as I left the projection on the jetty, mouthing its words to the empty air and maybe the seals, always assuming they had nothing better to do than listen to it.

CHAPTER TWO

In the end, they kept me under for a week.

I didn’t miss much. Below me, the clouds roiled and tore across the face of Sanction IV’s northern hemisphere, pouring rain on the men and women killing each other beneath. The construct visited the house regularly and kept me abreast of the more interesting details. Kemp’s offworld allies tried and failed to break the Protectorate blockade, at the cost of a brace of IP transports. A flight of smarter-than-average marauder bombs got through from somewhere unspecified and vaporised a Protectorate dreadnought. Government forces in the tropics held their positions while in the north-east the Wedge and other mercenary units lost ground to Kemp’s elite presidential guard. Evenfall continued to smoulder.

Like I said, I didn’t miss much.

When I awoke in the re-sleeving chamber, I was suffused in a head-to-foot glow of well-being. Mostly, that was chemical; military hospitals shoot their convalescent sleeves full of feelgood stuff just before download. It’s their equivalent of a welcome-home party, and it makes you feel like you could win this motherfucking war single-handed if they’d only let you up and at the bad guys. Useful effect, obviously. But what I also had, swimming alongside this patriot’s cocktail, was the simple pleasure of being intact and installed with a full set of functioning limbs and organs.

Until I talked to the doctor, that is.

“We pulled you out early,” she told me, the rage she’d exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. “On orders from Wedge command. It seems there isn’t time for you to recover from your wounds fully.”

“I feel fine.”

“Of course you do. You’re dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you’re going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.”

I blinked. “I didn’t know they were spraying that stuff.”

“No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.” She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. “We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you’d probably make a full recovery. As it is…” she shrugged. “Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital’s axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them, I knew.

“Hey, lieutenant!”

Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

“You made it out, lieutenant! Way to go!”

He turned about in the crowd.

“Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.”

Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally-mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fibre. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

“Lieutenant. We thought—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs!”

Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

“Good to see you, lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The 391 platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.”

Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

“Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?” said Munharto, gesturing flipper-like with his one remaining limb. “Seen the milflash yesterday.”

Kwok’s microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

“You taking the new 391, sir?”

“I don’t—”

“Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.”

I stayed off the axial deck after that.

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

“Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

“Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.” He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. “I really appreciate you not ah, not—”

“Forget it. I had.”

“Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.”—I stirred impatiently—“Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—”

“Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.” I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. “All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?”

He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Exactly what?”

Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.

“Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.”

“I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?”

I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. “Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—”

“Politics.” Schneider waved a hand dismissively. “This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of their annual profits to own.”

I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical attention that—at a pro-government estimate—half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.

I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.

“Alright.”

“You’re in?”

“I’m listening,” I said mildly. “Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.”

Schneider sucked in his cheeks. “I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, lieutenant. I need—”

“You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?”

There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.

“Well,” he said at last. “I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.”

“Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.”

I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.

But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn’t show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.

“The Es, huh? When did you serve?”

“A while ago. Why?”

“You at Innenin?”

His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I was falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.

I closed my eyes briefly.

“Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?”

Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.

“Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?”

Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.

It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.

This success, plus the scattered ruins and artefacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up, designed by the UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilisation is still out there somewhere. My own personal favourite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilisation.

In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.

Schneider grinned. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well just hear me out.” He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. “See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us, not like us physically, I mean we assume their civilisation had the same cultural basics as ours.”

Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.

“That means, we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centres of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light years out from the main Latimer system, that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins, but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re going and comes rushing across.”

“I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.”

At sub-light speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.

“Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?”

I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.

“So then,” he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, “you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first come, first served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.”

“For a percentage.”

“Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.”

“How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist.”

He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot’s Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.

I shrugged. “Nice work. And?”

“I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—”

“Scratchers?”

Schneider blinked. “Yeah. What about it?”

“This isn’t my planet,” I said patiently, “I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?”

“Oh. You know, kids.” He gestured, perplexed. “Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.”

“Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?”

“What?” he blinked again.

“Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?”

Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.

“They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.”

“Or turn up too late to get a better stake.”

“Yeah.” For some reason he didn’t like that crack either. “Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something.”

“Found what?”

“A Martian starship.” Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. “Intact.”

“Crap.”

“Yes, we did.”

I sighed again. “You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn’t got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?”

Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

“I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we, found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.”

“A gate?” Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. “You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?”

“Kovacs, it’s a gate.” Schneider spoke as if to a small child. “We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.”

“Into the ship?” Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

“No.” He shook his head, “Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.”

“Or a shuttle.” I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. “What were you flying?”

He grimaced. “Piece of shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.”

“What?” I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. “Wouldn’t fit?”

“Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,” said Schneider morosely. “Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole programme.”

“No one had a spacesuit?”

“What for?” Schneider spread his hands. “It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ‘cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?”

“Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?”

“Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?”

I shrugged. “Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.”

Schneider skinned me a tight grin. “You don’t think we could have handled selling to the corporates?”

“I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on who you were dealing with.”

“So who would you have gone to?”

I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. “That’s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well,” I offered him a small smile of my own. “I’m still listening. What happened next?”

Schneider’s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.

“What happened?” He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans’ gazes were snagged back to the performance. “What happened? This war is what fucking happened.”

CHAPTER THREE

Somewhere, a baby was crying.

For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I’d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren’t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.

“Hot here.”

Schneider had shut down the shuttle’s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer waited to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle’s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.

A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.

“Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,” I said briskly. “This is Corporal Schneider. We’re here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation.”

The sergeant frowned. “I wasn’t informed of this.”

“I’m informing you now, sergeant.”

In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely known on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate’s unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant’s throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and women starving in their bubblefabs.

“I’ll have to see some authorisation.”

I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain. In a planet-wide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers latitudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one had even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I’d had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about south-east of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.

“Will that be sufficient, sergeant?”

He pored over the printout, as if he was hoping the authorisation flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience which was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby’s crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of here.

The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. “You’ll have to see the commandant,” he said woodenly. “These people are all under government supervision.”

I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.

“Right.” I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. “Let’s go talk to the commandant then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won’t take long.”

The commandant’s office was in a double-storey ‘fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early millennium gargoyles and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the ‘fab and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.

Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a moulded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways slumped figure behind the desk.

“Commandant?”

The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.

“What is it, sergeant?”

The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armour but wasn’t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was made of lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist and forearm section was set with a half dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.

I stood in front of the desk and saluted.

“Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,” I said softly.

“Well.” The commandant struggled upright in his chair. “Perhaps you’d like more light in here, lieutenant. I like the dark, but then,” he chuckled behind closed lips. “I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.”

He groped across the keyboard and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.

“Is that better?” The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. “I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.” The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. “A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?”

My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.

“I’d like to have your full attention, commandant.”

For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical, to look at the jacked-in cable.

“Oh,” he whispered. “This.”

Abruptly, he lurched round to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.

“Get out.”

The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them gently pulling the door shut behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.

“Down to a trickle, I assure you,” he said, gesturing at the still winking light. “Probably couldn’t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.” He made an obvious effort. “So what, may I ask, do Carrera’s Wedge want with me? We’ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I’m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.” Another gesture, this time turned outwards to the bank of monitors. “The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I’ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn’t very far along yet—”

“I haven’t come for your supplies, commandant.”

“Ah, then it’s a reckoning, is it. Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel’s scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?” The idea seemed to amuse him. “Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?”

I shook my head.

“I’m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.”

“Ah yes, the archaeologue.”

A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorisation on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.

“Some problem, commandant?” I asked quietly.

He lowered the arm and leant on his elbow, wagging the authorisation to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.

“What do you want her for?” he asked, equally softly. “Little Tanya the Scratcher. What’s she to the Wedge?”

I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn’t be difficult to do, I’d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months, but there was the sergeant outside the door and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn’t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.

“That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?”

But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.

Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.

Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.

For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.

“Sergeant,” he bellowed hoarsely.

The door opened.

“Sergeant, get Wardani out of ‘fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant’s shuttle.”

The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.

“Thank you, commandant.” I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.

“Popular woman,” he said.

I looked back. “What?”

“Wardani.” He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. “You’re not the first.”

“Not the first what?”

“Less than three months ago.” As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. “We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they’re in, in these parts.” His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. “Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.”

I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant’s desk and cradled his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon bumping the roof of a room where the party has long since burnt itself out.

“Lieutenant?”

The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.

“Lieutenant?”

“Coming.” I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.

Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.

“Problem?”

“No. Get rid of these kids.”

Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child’s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.

“You’re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren’t all bad,” I said quietly.

Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. “That’s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show’s over.”

The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.

“Where’d you get those things?”

“Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn’t have much use for them.”

“No, they’ve already shot all the refugees down there.” I nodded at the departing children, now chattering excitedly over their new acquisitions. “The camp militia’ll probably confiscate the lot once we’re gone.”

Schneider shrugged. “I know. But I’d already given out the chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?”

It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring out the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.

“Here she comes,” said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.

Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgement.

She swayed, stumbled and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.

“Tanya Wardani,” said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar code strips and a scanner. “I’ll need your ID for the release.”

I cocked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impassively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.

“Lieutenant.”

“Yes, what is it?” Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.

“Will she be coming back?”

I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.

“No, sergeant,” I said, as if to a small child. “She won’t be coming back. She’s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her.”

I closed the hatch.

But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.

He didn’t even bother to shield his face from the dust.

CHAPTER FOUR

We flew west from the camp on grav effect, over a mixture of desert scrub and blots of darker vegetation where the planet’s flora had managed to get a lock on shallow-running aquifers. About twenty minutes later we picked up the coast and headed out to sea over waters that Wedge military intelligence said were infested with Kempist smart mines. Schneider kept our speed down, subsonic the whole time. Easy to track.

I spent the early part of the flight in the main cabin, ostensibly going through a current affairs datastack that the shuttle was pulling down from one of Carrera’s command satellites, but in reality watching Tanya Wardani with an Envoy-tuned eye. She sat slumped in the seat furthest from the hatch and hence closest to the right side viewports, forehead resting against the glass. Her eyes were open, but whether she was focusing on the ground below was hard to tell. I didn’t try to speak to her—I’d seen the same mask on a thousand other faces this year, and I knew she wasn’t coming out from behind it until she was ready, which might be never. Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. Lately, they’ve been calling it War Shock Syndrome, an all encompassing term which bleakly but rather neatly puts the writing on the wall for those who would like to treat it. There may be a plethora of more and less effective psychological techniques for repair, but the ultimate aim of any medical philosophy, that of prevention rather than cure, is in this case clearly beyond the wit of humanity to implement.

To me it comes as no surprise that we’re still flailing around with Neanderthal spanners in the elegant wreckage of Martian civilisation without really having a clue how all that ancient culture used to operate. After all, you wouldn’t expect a butcher of farm livestock to understand or be able to take over from a team of neurosurgeons. There’s no telling how much irreparable damage we may have already caused to the body of knowledge and technology the Martians have unwisely left lying around for us to discover. In the end, we’re not much more than a pack of jackals, nosing through the broken bodies and wreckage of a plane crash.

“Coming up on the coast,” Schneider’s voice said over the intercom. “You want to get up here?”

I lifted my face away from the holographic data display, flattened the data motes to the base and looked across at Wardani. She had shifted her head slightly at the sound of Schneider’s voice, but the eyes that found the speaker set in the roof were still dulled with emotional shielding. It hadn’t taken me very long to extract from Schneider the previous circumstances of his relationship with this woman, but I still wasn’t sure how that would affect things now. On his own admission it had been a limited thing, abruptly terminated by the outbreak of war almost two years ago and there was no reason to suppose it could cause problems. My own worst-case scenario was that the whole starship story was an elaborate con on Schneider’s part for no other purpose than to secure the archaeologue’s release and get the two of them offworld. There had been a previous attempt to liberate Wardani, if the camp commandant was to be believed, and part of me wondered if those mysteriously well equipped commandos hadn’t been Schneider’s last set of dupes in the bid to reunite him with his partner. If that turned out to be the case, I was going to be angry.

Inside me, at the level where it really mattered, I didn’t give the idea much credence; too many details had checked out in the time since we’d left the hospital. Dates and names were correct—there had been an archaeological dig on the coast north-west of Sauberville, and Tanya Wardani was registered as site regulator. The haulage liaison was listed as Guild Pilot Ian Mendel, but it was Schneider’s face, and the hardware manifest began with the serial number and flight records of a cumbersome Mowai Ten Series suborbital. Even if Schneider had tried to get Wardani out before, it was for far more material reasons than simple affection.

And if he hadn’t, then somewhere along the line someone else had been dealt into this game.

Whatever happened, Schneider would bear watching.

I closed down the data display and got up, just as the shuttle banked seaward. Steadying myself with a hand on the overhead lockers, I looked down at the archaeologue.

“I’d fasten your seatbelt if I were you. The next few minutes are likely to be a little rough.”

She made no response, but her hands moved in her lap. I made my way forward to the cockpit.

Schneider looked up as I entered, hands easy on the arms of the manual flight chair. He nodded at a digital display which he’d maximised near the top of the instrument projection space.

“Depth counter’s still at less than five metres. Bottom shelves out for kilometres before we hit deep water. You sure those fuckers don’t come in this close?”

“If they were in this close, you’d see them sticking out of the water,” I said, taking the co-pilot’s seat. “Smart mine’s not much smaller than a marauder bomb. Basically an automated mini-sub. You got the set online?”

“Sure. Just mask up. Weapon systems on the right arm.”

I slid the elasticated gunner’s eyemask down over my face and touched the activate pads at the temples. A seascape in bright primaries wrapped around my field of vision, pale blue shaded deeper grey with the landscape of the seabed beneath. Hardware came through in shades of red, depending on how much it corresponded to the parameters I’d programmed in earlier. Most of it was light pink in colour, inanimate alloy wreckage devoid of electronic activity. I let myself slide forward into the virtual representation of what the shuttle’s sensors were seeing, forced myself to stop actively looking for anything and relaxed the last mental millimetres into the Zen state.

Minesweeping was not something the Envoy Corps taught as such, but the total poise that only comes, paradoxically, with an utter lack of expectation was vital to the core training. A Protectorate Envoy, deployed as digital human freight via hyperspatial needlecast, can expect to wake up to literally anything. At the very least, you habitually find yourself in unfamiliar bodies on unfamiliar worlds where people are shooting at you. Even on a good day, no amount of briefing can prepare you for a total change of environment like that, and in the invariably unstable to lethally dangerous sets of circumstances the Envoys have been created to deal with, there just isn’t any point.

Virginia Vidaura, Corps trainer, hands in the pockets of her coveralls, looking us over with calm speculation. Day one induction.

Since it is logistically impossible to expect everything, she told us evenly, we will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

I didn’t even consciously see the first smart mine. There was a red flare in the corner of one eye, and my hands had already matched coordinates and loosed the shuttle’s hunter-killer micros. The little missiles ran green traces across the virtual seascape, plunged beneath the surface like sharp knives in flesh and pricked the squatting mine before it could either move or respond. Flash blast of detonation and the surface of the sea heaved upward like a body on an interrogation table.

Once upon a time men had to run their weapons systems all by themselves. They went up in the air in flyers not much bigger or better equipped than bathtubs with wings, and fired off whatever clumsy hardware they could squeeze into the cockpit with them. Later, they designed machines that could do the job faster and more accurately than humanly possible and for a while it was a machine’s world up there. Then the emerging biosciences began to catch up and suddenly the same speed and precision capacity was available as a human option again. Since then it’s been a race of sorts between technologies to see which can be upgraded faster, the external machines or the human factor. In that particular race, Envoy psychodynamics were a sharp surprise sprint up the inside lane.

There are war machines that are faster than me, but we weren’t lucky enough to have one aboard. The shuttle was a hospital auxiliary, and its strictly defensive weaponry ran to the micro turret in the nose and a decoy-and-evade package that I wouldn’t have trusted to fly a kite. We were going to have to do this ourselves.

“One down. The rest of the pack won’t be far away. Kill your speed. Get us down on the deck and arm the tinsel.”

They came from the west, scuttling across the seabed like fat-bodied cylindrical spiders, drawn to the violent death of their brother. I felt the shuttle tip forward as Schneider brought us down to barely ten metres altitude and the solid thump as the tinsel bomb racks deployed. My eyes flickered across the mines. Seven of them, converging. They usually ran five to a pack so this had to be the remnants of two groups, though who’d thinned their numbers out so much was a mystery to me. From what I’d read in the reports, there’d been nothing in these waters but fishing boats since the war began. The seabed was littered with them.

I acquired the lead mine and killed it almost casually. As I watched, the first torpedoes erupted from the other six and rose through the water towards us.

“They’re on us.”

“Seen them,” said Schneider laconically, and the shuttle flinched into an evasive curve. I peppered the sea with micros on autoseek.

Smart mine is a misnomer. They’re actually pretty stupid. It stands to reason, they’re built for such a narrow range of activity it isn’t advisable to programme in much intellect. They attach themselves to the seabed with a claw for launch stability, and they wait for something to pass overhead. Some can dig themselves deep enough to hide from spectroscanners, some camouflage themselves as seabed wreckage. Essentially, they’re a static weapon. On the move, they can still fight but their accuracy suffers.

Better yet, their minds have a dogmatic either/or target acquisition system that tags everything surface or airborne before it fires on it. Against air traffic it uses surface-to-air micros, against shipping the torpedoes. The torpedoes can convert to missile mode at a pinch, shedding their propulsion systems at surface level and using crude thrusters to get aloft, but they’re slow.

At nearly surface level and throttled back almost to hovering, we’d been made out as a ship. The torpedoes came up for air in our shadow, found nothing and the autoseek micros destroyed them while they were still crying to shrug off their underwater drives. Meanwhile, the spread of micros I’d launched sought and destroyed two, no, wait, three of the mines. At this rate—

Malfunction.

Malfunction.

Malfunction.

The fail light pulsed in the upper left field of my vision, detail scrolling down. I had no time to read it. The fire controls were dead in my hands, jammed solid, the next two micros unarmed in their launch cradles. Fucking mothballed UN surplus flashing through my mind like a falling meteor. I slammed the emergency autorepair option. The shuttle’s rudimentary troubleshooter brain leapt down into the jammed circuits. No time. It could take whole minutes to fix. The remaining three mines launched surface to air at us.

“Sch—”

Schneider, whatever his other failings, was a good flyer. He flung the shuttle on its tail before the syllable was out of my mouth. My head snapped back against the seat as we leapt into the sky, trailing a swarm of surface-to-air missiles.

“I’m jammed.”

“I know,” he said tautly.

“Tinsel them,” I yelled, competing with the proximity alerts that screamed in my ears. The altitude numerals flashed over the kilometre mark.

“On it.”

The shuttle boomed with the tinsel bombs’ launch. They detonated two seconds in our wake, sowing the sky with tiny electronic appetisers. The surface-to-air fire spent itself amongst the decoys. On the weapons board at the side of my vision, a cleared light flashed green, and as if to prove the point the launcher executed its last jammed command and launched the two waiting micros into the targetless space ahead of us. Beside me, Schneider whooped and spun the shuttle about. With the high-manoeuvre fields belatedly compensating, I felt the turn slop through my guts like choppy water and had time to hope that Tanya Wardani hadn’t eaten recently.

We hung for an instant on the wings of the shuttle’s AG fields, then Schneider killed the lift and we plunged a steep line back towards the surface of the sea. From the water, a second wave of missiles rose to meet us.

“Tinsel!!!”

The bomb racks banged open again. Sighting on the three undamaged mines below, I emptied the shuttle’s magazines and hoped, breath held back. The micros launched clean. At the same moment, Schneider threw on the grav fields again and the little vessel shuddered from end to end. The tinsel bombs, now falling faster than the crash-reversed shuttle that had launched them, exploded fractionally ahead and below us. My virtual vision flooded with crimson sleet from the storm of decoy broadcast, and then the explosions of the surface-to-air missiles as they destroyed themselves amidst it. My own micros were away, fired through the tiny window of opportunity before the tinsel blew and locked onto the mines somewhere below.

The shuttle spiralled down behind the debris of tinsel and misled missiles. Scant moments before we hit the surface of the sea, Schneider fired one more, carefully doctored pair of tinsel bombs. They detonated just as we slipped below the waves.

“We’re under,” said Schneider.

On my screen, the pale blue of the sea deepened as we sank, nose down. I twisted around, searching for the mines and found only a satisfying array of wreckage. I let out the last breath I’d drawn somewhere up in the missile-strewn sky and rolled my head back in the seat.

“That,” I said to no one in particular. “Was a mess.”

We touched bottom, stuck for a moment and then drifted fractionally upward again. Around us, the shrapnel from the doctored tinsel bombs settled slowly to the seabed. I studied the pink fragments with care and smiled. I’d packed the last two bombs myself—less than an hour’s work the night before we came to get Wardani, but it had taken three days reconnoitering deserted battlezones and bombed-out landing fields to gather the necessary pieces of hull casing and circuitry to fill them.

I peeled off the gunner’s mask and rubbed at my eyes.

“How far off are we?”

Schneider did something to the instrument display. “About six hours, maintaining this buoyancy. If I help the current along with the gravs we could do it in half that.”

“Yeah, and we could get blown out of the water too. I didn’t go through the last two minutes for target practice. You keep the fields banked all the way, and use the time to figure out some way to wipe the face off this bucket.”

Schneider gave me a mutinous look.

“And what are you going to be doing all that time?”

“Repairs,” I said shortly, heading back for Tanya Wardani.

CHAPTER FIVE

The fire threw leaping shadows, making her face into a camouflage mask of light and dark. It was a face that might have been handsome before the camp swallowed her, but the rigours of political internment had left it a gaunt catalogue of bones and hollows. The eyes were hooded, the cheeks sunken. Deep inside the wells of her gaze, firelight glittered on fixed pupils. Stray hair fell across her forehead like straw. One of my cigarettes slanted between her lips, unlit.

“You don’t want to smoke that?” I asked after a while.

It was like talking on a bad satellite link—a two-second delay before the glitter in her eyes shifted upward to focus on my face. Her voice ghosted out, rusty with disuse.

“What?”

“The cigarette. Site Sevens, best I could get outside Landfall.” I handed the packet across to her and she fumbled it, turning it over a couple of times before she found the ignition patch and touched it to the end of the cigarette in her mouth, Most of the smoke escaped and was carried away on the soft breeze, but she took some down and grimaced as it bit.

“Thanks,” she said quietly, and held the packet in cupped hands, looking down at it as if it were a small animal she had rescued from drowning. I smoked the rest of my own cigarette in silence, gaze flickering along the treeline above the beach. It was a programmed wariness, not based on any real perception of danger, the Envoy analogue of a relaxed man beating time to music with his fingers. In the Envoys you’re aware of potential hazards in the surroundings, the way most people are aware that things will fall out of their hands if they let them go. The programming goes in at the same instinctual level. You don’t let down your guard ever, any more than a normal human being would absent-mindedly let go of a filled glass in mid-air.

“You’ve done something to me.”

It was the same low voice she had used to thank me for the cigarette, but when I dropped my gaze from the trees to look at her, something had kindled in her eyes, She was not asking me a question. “I can feel it,” she said, touching the side of her head with splayed fingers. “Here. It’s like. Opening.”

I nodded, feeling cautiously for the right words. On most worlds I’ve visited, going into someone’s head uninvited is a serious moral offence, and only government agencies get away with it on a regular basis. There was no reason to assume the Latimer sector, Sanction IV or Tanya Wardani would be any different. Envoy co-option techniques make rather brutal use of the deep wells of psychosexual energy that drive humans at a genetic level. Properly mined, the matrix of animal strength on tap in those places will speed up psychic healing by whole orders of magnitude. You start with light hypnosis, move into quick-fix personality engagement and thence to close bodily contact that only misses definition as sexual foreplay on a technicality. A gentle, hypnotically induced orgasm usually secures the bonding process, but at the final stage with Wardani, something had made me pull back. The whole process was uncomfortably close to a sexual assault as it was.

On the other hand, I needed Wardani in one psychic piece, and under normal circumstances that would have taken months, maybe years, to achieve. We didn’t have that kind of time.

“It’s a technique,” I offered tentatively “A healing system. I used to be an Envoy.”

She drew on her cigarette. “I thought the Envoys were supposed to be killing machines.”

“That’s what the Protectorate wants you to think. Keeps the colonies scared at a gut level. The truth is a lot more complex, and ultimately it’s a lot more scary, when you think it through.” I shrugged. “Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.”

“Really? And what are those?”

I felt the conversation gathering itself for flight, and leaned forward to the heat of the fire.

“Sharya. Adoracion. The big bad high-tech Envoys, riding in on hypercast beams and decanting into state-of-the-art biotech sleeves to crush all resistance. We used to do that too, of course, but what most people don’t realise is that our five most successful deployments ever were all covert diplomatic postings, with barely any bloodshed at all. Regime engineering. We came and went, and no one even realised we’d been there.”

“You sound proud of it.”

“I’m not.”

She looked at me steadily. “Hence the ‘used to’?”

“Something like that.”

“So how does one stop being an Envoy?” I was wrong. This wasn’t conversation. Tanya Wardani was sounding me out. “Did you resign? Or did they throw you out?”

I smiled faintly. “I’d really rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”

“You’d rather not talk about it?” Her voice never rose, but it splintered into sibilant shards of rage. “Goddamn you, Kovacs. Who do you think you are? You come to this planet with your fucking weapons of mass destruction and your profession-of-violence airs, and you think you’re going to play the injured-child-inside with me. Fuck you and your pain. I nearly died in that camp, I watched other women and children die. I don’t fucking care what you went through. You answer me. Why aren’t you with the Envoys any more?”

The fire crackled to itself. I sought out an ember in its depths and watched it for a while. I saw the laser light again, playing against the mud and Jimmy de Soto’s ruined face. I’d been to this place in my mind countless times before, but it never got any better. Some idiot once said that time heals all wounds, but they didn’t have Envoys back when that was written down. Envoy conditioning carries with it total recall, and when they discharge you, you don’t get to give it back.

“Have you heard of Innenin?” I asked her.

“Of course.” It was unlikely she hadn’t—the Protectorate doesn’t get its nose bloodied very often, and when it happens the news travels, even across interstellar distances. “You were there?”

I nodded.

“I heard everybody died in the viral strike.”

“Not quite. Everybody in the second wave died. They deployed the virus too late to get the initial beachhead, but some of it leaked over through the communications net and that fried most of the rest of us. I was lucky. My comlink was down.”

“You lost friends?”

“Yes.”

“And you resigned?”

I shook my head. “I was invalided out. Psych-profiled unfit for Envoy duties.”

“I thought you said your comlink—”

“The virus didn’t get me; the aftermath did.” I spoke slowly, trying to keep a lock on the remembered bitterness. “There was a Court of Enquiry—you must have heard about that too.”

“They indicted the High Command, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, for about ten minutes. Indictment quashed. That’s roughly when I became unfit for Envoy duties. You might say I had a crisis of faith.”

“Very touching.” She sounded abruptly tired, the previous anger too much for her to sustain. “Pity it didn’t last, eh?”

“I don’t work for the Protectorate any more, Tanya.”

Wardani gestured. “That uniform you’re wearing says otherwise.”

“This uniform,” I fingered the black material with distaste, “is strictly a temporary thing.”

“I don’t think so, Kovacs.”

“Schneider’s wearing it too,” I pointed out.

“Schneider…” The word gusted out of her doubtfully. She obviously still knew him as Mendel. “Schneider is an asshole.”

I glanced down the beach to where Schneider was banging about in the shuttle with what seemed like an inordinate degree of noise. The techniques I’d used to bring Wardani’s psyche back to the surface hadn’t gone down well with him, and he’d liked it even less when I’d told him to give us some time alone by the fire.

“Really? I thought you and he…”

“Well.” She considered the fire for a while. “He’s an attractive asshole.”

“Did you know him before the dig?”

She shook her head. “Nobody knew anybody before the dig. You just get assigned, and hope for the best.”

“You got assigned to the Dangrek coast?” I asked casually.

“No.” She drew in her shoulders as if against cold. “I’m a Guild Master. I could have got work on the Plains digs if I’d wanted to. I chose Dangrek. The rest of the team were assigned Scratchers. They didn’t buy my reasons, but they were all young and enthusiastic. I guess even a dig with an eccentric’s better than no dig at all.”

“And what were your reasons?”

There was a long pause, which I spent cursing myself silently for the slip. The question had been genuine—most of my knowledge of the Archaeologue Guild was gleaned from popular digests of their history and occasional successes. I had never met a Guild Master before, and what Schneider had to say about the dig was obviously a filtered version of Wardani’s pillow talk, stepped on by his own lack of deeper knowledge. I wanted the full story. But if there was one thing that Tanya Wardani had seen a surplus of during her internment, it was probably interrogation. The tiny increment of incisiveness in my voice must have hit her like a marauder bomb.

I was marshalling something to fill the silence, when she broke it for me, in a voice that only missed being steady by a micron.

“You’re after the ship? Mende—” She started again. “Schneider told you about it?”

“Yeah, but he was kind of vague. Did you know it was going to be there?”

“Not specifically. But it made sense; it had to happen sooner or later. Have you ever read Wycinski?”

“Heard of him. Hub theory, right?”

She allowed herself a thin smile. “Hub theory isn’t Wycinski’s; it just owes him everything. What Wycinski said, among others at the time, is that everything we’ve discovered about the Martians so far points to a much more atomistic society than our own. You know—winged and carnivorous, originally from airborne predator stock, almost no cultural traces of pack behaviour.” The words started to flow—conversational patterns fading out as the lecturer in her tuned in unconsciously. “That suggests the need for a much broader personal domain than humans require and a general lack of sociability. Think of them as birds of prey if you like. Solitary and aggressive. That they built cities at all is evidence that they managed at least in part to overcome the genetic legacy, maybe in the same way humans have got a halfway lock on the xenophobic tendencies that pack behaviour has given us. Where Wycinski differs from most of the experts is in his belief that this tendency would only be repressed to the extent that it was sufficiently desirable to group together, and that with the rise of technology it would be reversible. You still with me?”

“Just don’t speed up.”

In fact, I wasn’t having a problem, and some of this more basic stuff I’d heard before in one form or another. But Wardani was relaxing visibly as she talked, and the longer that went on the better chance there was of her recovery remaining stable. Even during the brief moments it had taken her to launch into the lecture, she had grown more animated, hands gesturing, face intent rather than distant. A fraction at a time, Tanya Wardani was reclaiming herself.

“You mentioned hub theory, that’s a bullshit spin-off; fucking Carter and Bogdanovich whoring off the back of Wycinski’s work on Martian cartography. See, one of the things about Martian maps is, there are no common centres. No matter where the archaeologue teams went on Mars, they always found themselves at the centre of the maps they dug up. Every settlement put itself slap in the middle of its own maps, always the biggest blob, regardless of actual size or apparent function. Wycinski argued that this shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it tied in with what we’d already surmised about the way Martian minds worked. To any Martian drawing a map, the most important point on that map was bound to be where the map maker was located at the time of drawing. All Carter and Bogdanovich did was to apply that rationale to the astrogation charts. If every Martian city considered itself the centre of a planetary map, then every colonised world would in turn consider itself the centre of the Martian hegemony. Therefore, the fact that Mars was marked big and dead centre on all these charts meant nothing in objective terms. Mars might easily be a recently colonised backwater, and the real hub of Martian culture could be literally any other speck on the chart.” She pulled a disdainful face. “That’s hub theory.”

“You don’t sound too convinced.”

Wardani plumed smoke into the night. “I’m not. Like Wycinski said at the time, so fucking what? Carter and Bogdanovich completely missed the point. By accepting the validity of what Wycinski said about Martian spatial perceptions, they should have also seen that the whole concept of hegemony was probably outside Martian terms of reference.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” The thin smile again, more forced this time. “That’s where it started to get political. Wycinski went on record with that, saying that wherever the Martian race had originated, there was no reason to suppose that the mother world would be accorded any more importance in the scheme of things than quote absolutely essential in matters of basic factual education unquote.”

“Mummy, where do we come from? That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing exactly. You might point it out on the map, that’s where we all came from once, but since where we are now is far more important in real, day-to-day terms, that’s about as far as the mother world homage would ever get.”

“I don’t suppose Wycinski ever thought to disown this view of things as intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman, did he?”

Wardani gave me a sharp look. “How much do you really know about the Guild, Kovacs?”

I held up finger and thumb a modest span apart. “Sorry, I just like to show off. I’m from Harlan’s World. Minoru and Gretzky went to trial about the time I got into my teens. I was in a gang. Standard proof of how antisocial you were was to carve air graffiti about the trial in a public place. We all had the transcripts by heart. Intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman came up a lot in Gretzky’s recantation. Seemed like it was the standard Guild statement for keeping your research grants intact.”

She lowered her gaze. “It was, for a while. And no, Wycinski wouldn’t play that tune. He loved the Martians, he admired them, and he said so in public. That’s why you only hear about him in connection with fucking hub theory. They pulled his funding, suppressed most of his findings and gave it all to Carter and Bogdanovich to run with. And what a blowjob those two whores gave in return. The UN commission voted a seven per cent increase in the Protectorate strategic budget the same year, all based on paranoid fantasies of a Martian overculture somewhere out there waiting to jump us.”

“Neat.”

“Yeah, and totally impossible to disprove. All the astrogation charts we’ve recovered on other worlds bear out Wycinski’s finding—each world centres itself on the map the way Mars did, and that single fact is used to scare the UN into keeping a high strategic budget and a tight military presence across the whole Protectorate. No one wants to hear about what Wycinski’s research really means, and anybody who talks too loud about it, or tries to apply the findings in research of their own is either defunded overnight or ridiculed, which in the end comes to the same thing.”

She flicked her cigarette into the fire and watched it flare up.

“That what happened to you?” I asked.

“Not quite.”

There was a palpable click to the last syllable, like a lock turning. Behind me, I could hear Schneider coming up the beach, his checklist for the shuttle or maybe just his patience exhausted. I shrugged.

“Talk about it later, you want to.”

“Maybe. How about you tell me what all that macho high-G manoeuvre bullshit was today?”

I glanced up at Schneider as he joined us beside the fire. “Hear that? Complaint about the in-flight entertainment.”

“Fucking passengers,” Schneider grunted, picking up the clowning cue flawlessly as he lowered himself to the sand. “Nothing ever changes.”

“You going to tell her, or shall I?”

“Was your idea. Got a Seven?”

Wardani held up the packet, then tossed them into Schneider’s grasp. She turned back to me. “Well?”

“The Dangrek coast,” I said slowly, “whatever its archaeological merits may have been, is part of the Northern Rim territories and the Northern Rim has been designated by Carrera’s Wedge as one of nine primary objectives in winning the war. And judging from the amount of organic damage going on up there at the moment, the Kempists have come to the same conclusion.”

“So?”

“So, mounting an archaeological expedition while Kemp and the Wedge are up there fighting for territorial dominance isn’t my idea of smart. We have to get the fighting diverted.”

“Diverted?” The disbelief in her voice was gratifying to hear. I played to it, shrugging again.

“Diverted, or postponed. Whatever works. The point is, we need help. And the only place we’re going to get help of that order is from the corporates. We’re going to Landfall, and since I’m supposed to be on active service, Schneider’s a Kempist deserter, you’re a prisoner-of-war and this is a stolen shuttle, we need to shed a little heat before we do that. Satellite coverage of our little run-in with the smart mines back there will read like they took us down. A search of the seabed will show up pieces of wreckage compatible with that. Allowing that no one looks at the evidence too closely, we’ll be filed as missing presumed vaporised, which suits me fine.”

“You think they’ll let it go at that?”

“Well, it’s a war. People getting killed shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.” I picked a stray length of wood out of the fire and started tracing a rough continental map in the sand. “Oh, they may wonder what I was doing down here when I’m supposed to be taking up a command on the Rim, but that’s the kind of detail that gets sifted in the aftermath of a conflict. Right now, Carrera’s Wedge are spread pretty thin in the north and Kemp’s forces are still pushing them towards the mountains. They’ve got the Presidential Guard coming in on this flank,” I prodded at the sand with my makeshift pointer, “And sea-launched air strikes from Kemp’s iceberg fleet over here. Carrera’s got a few more important things to worry about than the exact manner of my demise.”

“And you really think the Cartel are going to put all that on hold just for you?” Tanya Wardani swung her burning gaze from my face to Schneider’s. “You didn’t really buy into this, did you, Jan?”

Schneider made a small gesture with one hand. “Just listen to the man, Tanya. He’s jacked into the machine, he knows what he’s talking about.”

“Yeah, right.” The intense, hectic eyes snapped back to me. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for getting me out of the camp, because I am. I don’t think you can imagine quite how grateful I am. But now I’m out, I’d quite like to live. This, this plan, is all bullshit. You’re just going to get us all killed, either in Landfall by corporate samurai or caught in the crossfire at Dangrek. They aren’t going to—”

“You’re right,” I said patiently, and she shut up, surprised. “To a point, you’re right. The major corporates, the ones in the Cartel, they wouldn’t give this scheme a second glance. They can murder us, stick you into virtual interrogation until you tell them what they want to know and then just keep the whole thing under wraps until this war is over and they’ve won.”

“If they win.”

“They will,” I told her. “They always do, one way or the other. But we aren’t going to the majors. We’ve got to be smarter than that.”

I paused and poked at the fire, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how Schneider craned forward with tension. Without Tanya Wardani aboard, the whole thing was dead in the water and we all knew it.

The sea whispered itself up on the beach and back. Something popped and crackled in the depths of the fire.

“Alright.” She moved slightly, like someone bedridden shifting to a less aching posture. “Go on. I’m listening.”

Relief gusted out of Schneider audibly. I nodded.

“This is what we do. We target one corporate operator in particular, one of the smaller, hungrier ones. Might take a while to sound out, but it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we’ve got the target, we make them an offer they can’t refuse. A one-time only, limited period, bargain basement, satisfaction guaranteed purchase.”

I saw the way she exchanged glances with Schneider. Maybe it was all the monetary imagery that made her look to him.

“Small and hungry as you like, Kovacs, you’re still talking about a corporate player.” Her eyes locked onto mine. “Planetary wealth. And murder and virtual interrogation are hardly expensive. How do you propose to undercut that option?”

“Simple. We scare them.”

“You scare them.” She looked at me for a moment, and then coughed out a small, unwilling laugh. “Kovacs, they should have you on disc. You’re perfect post-trauma entertainment. So, tell me. You’re going to scare a corporate block. What with, slasher puppets?”

I felt a genuine smile twitch at my own lips. “Something like that.”

CHAPTER SIX

It took Schneider the better part of the next morning to wipe the shuttle’s datacore, while Tanya Wardani walked aimless scuffing circles in the sand or sat beside the open hatch and talked to him. I left them alone and walked up to the far end of the beach where there was a black rock headland. The rock proved simple to scale and the view from the top was worth the few scrapes I picked up on the way. I leaned my back against a convenient outcrop and looked out to the horizon, recalling fragments of a dream from the previous night.

Harlan’s World is small for a habitable planet and its seas slop about unpredictably under the influence of three moons. Sanction IV is much larger, larger even than Latimer or Earth, and it has no natural satellites, all of which makes for wide, placid oceans. Set against the memories of my early life on Harlan’s World, this calm always seemed slightly suspicious, as if the sea were holding its watery breath, waiting for something cataclysmic to happen. It was a creepy sensation and the Envoy conditioning kept it locked down most of the time by the simple expedient of not allowing the comparison to cross my mind. In dreamsleep, the conditioning is less effective, and evidently something in my head was worrying at the cracks.

In the dream, I was standing on a shingle beach somewhere on Sanction IV, looking out at the tranquil swells, when the surface began to heave and swell. I watched, rooted to the spot, as mounds of water shifted and broke and flowed past each other like sinuous black muscles. What waves there were at the water’s edge were gone, sucked back out to where the sea was flexing. A certainty made in equal parts of cold dread and aching sadness rose in me to match the disturbances offshore. I knew beyond doubt. Something monstrous was coming up.

But I woke up before it surfaced.

A muscle twitched in my leg and I sat up irritably. The dregs of the dream rinsed around the base of my mind, seeking connection with something more substantial.

Maybe it was fallout from the duel with the smart mines. I’d watched the sea heave upward as our missiles detonated beneath the surface.

Yeah, right. Very traumatic.

My mind skittered through a few other recent combat memories, looking for a match. I stopped it, rapidly. Pointless exercise. A year and a half of hands-on nastiness for Carrera’s Wedge had laid up enough trauma in my head to give work to a whole platoon of psychosurgeons. I was entitled to a few nightmares. Without the Envoy conditioning, I’d probably have suffered a screaming mental collapse months ago. And combat memories weren’t what I wanted to look at right now.

I made myself lie back again and relax into the day. The morning sun was already beginning to build towards semi-tropical midday heat, and the rock was warm to the touch. Between my half-closed eyelids, light moved the way it had in the lochside convalescent virtuality. I let myself drift.

Time passed unused.

My phone hummed quietly to itself. I reached down without opening my eyes and squeezed it active. Noted the increased weight of heat on my body, the light drenching of sweat on my legs.

“Ready to roll,” said Schneider’s voice. “You still up on that rock?”

I sat up unwillingly. “Yeah. You make the call yet?”

“All cleared. That scrambler uplink you stole? Beautiful. Crystal clear. They’re waiting on us.”

“Be right down.”

Inside my head, the same residue. The dream had not gone.

Something coming up.

I stowed the thought with the phone, and started downward.

Archaeology is a messy science.

You’d think, with all the high-tech advances of the past few centuries, that we’d have the practice of robbing graves down to a fine art by now. After all, we can pick up the telltale traces of Martian civilisation across interplanetary distances these days. Satellite surveys and remote sensing let us map their buried cities through metres of solid rock or hundreds of metres of sea, and we’ve even built machines that can make educated guesses about the more inscrutable remnants of what they left behind. With nearly half a millennium of practice, we really ought to be getting good at this stuff.

But the fact is, no matter how subtle your detection science is, once you’ve found something, you’ve still got to dig it up. And with the vast capital investment the corporates have made in the race to understand the Martians, the digging is usually done with about as much subtlety as a crew night out in Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. There are finds to be made and dividends to be paid, and the fact that there are—apparently—no Martians around to object to the environmental damage doesn’t help. The corporates swing in, rip the locks off the vacated worlds, and stand back while the Archaeologue Guild swarm all over the fixtures. And when the primary sites have been exhausted, no one usually bothers to tidy up.

You get places like Dig 27.

Hardly the most imaginative name for a town, but there was a certain amount of accuracy in the choice. Dig 27 had sprung up around the excavation of the same name, served for fifty years as dormitory, refectory and leisure complex for the archaeologue workforce, and was now in steep decline as the seams of xenoculture ore panned out to the dregs. The original dighead was a gaunt centipedal skeleton, straddling the skyline on stilled retrieval belts and awkwardly bent support struts as we flew in from the east. The town started beneath the drooping tail of the structure and spread from it in sporadic and uncertain clumps like an unenthusiastic concrete fungus. Buildings rarely heaved themselves above five storeys, and many of those that had were rather obviously derelict, as if the effort of upward growth had exhausted them beyond the ability to sustain internal life.

Schneider banked around the skull end of the stalled dighead, flattened out and floated down towards a piece of wasteground between three listing pylons which presumably delineated Dig 27’s landing field. Dust boiled up from the badly kept ferrocrete as we hovered and I saw jagged cracks blown naked by our landing brakes. Over the comset, a senile navigation beacon husked a request for identification. Schneider ignored it, knocked over the primaries and climbed from his seat with a yawn.

“End of the line, folks. Everybody out.”

We followed him back to the main cabin and watched while he strapped on one of the unsubtle sawn-off particle throwers we’d liberated with the shuttle. He looked up, caught me watching and winked.

“I thought these were your friends.” Tanya Wardani was watching as well, alarmed if the expression on her face was anything to go by.

Schneider shrugged. “They were,” he said. “But you can’t be too careful.”

“Oh great.” She turned to me. “Have you got anything a bit less bulky than that cannon that I could maybe borrow. Something I can lift.”

I lifted the edges of my jacket aside to show the two Wedge-customised Kalashnikov interface guns where they rested in the chest harness.

“I’d lend you one of these, but they’re personally coded.”

“Take a blaster, Tanya,” said Schneider without looking up from his own preparations. “More chance you’ll hit something with it anyway. Slug throwers are for fashion victims.”

The archaeologue raised her eyebrows. I smiled a little. “He’s probably right. Here, you don’t have to wear it around your waist. The straps web out like this. Sling it over your shoulder.”

I moved to help her fit the weapon and as she turned towards me something indefinable happened in the small space between our bodies. As I settled the bolstered weapon at the downward slope of her left breast, her eyes slanted upward to mine. They were, I saw, the colour of jade under swift-flowing water.

“That comfortable?”

“Not especially.”

I went to move the holster and she raised a hand to stop me. Against the dusty ebony of my arm, her fingers looked like naked bones, skeletal and frail.

“Leave it, it’ll do.”

“OK. Look, you just pull down and the holster lets it go. Push back up and it grips again. Like that.”

“Got it.”

The exchange had not been lost on Schneider. He cleared his throat loudly and went to crack the hatch. As it hinged outward, he held onto a handgrip at the leading edge and swung down with practised flyer nonchalance. The effect was spoiled slightly as he landed and began coughing in the still settling dust our landing brake had raised. I suppressed a grin.

Wardani went after him, letting herself down awkwardly with the heels of her palms on the floor of the open hatchway. Mindful of the dust clouds outside, I stayed in the hatchway, eyes narrowed against the airborne grit in an attempt to see if we had a reception committee.

And we did.

They emerged from the dust like figures on a frieze gradually sandblasted clean by someone like Tanya Wardani. I counted seven in all, bulky silhouettes swathed in desert gear and spiky with weapons. The central figure looked deformed, taller than the others by half a metre but swollen and misshapen from the chest up. They advanced in silence.

I folded my arms across my chest so my fingertips touched the butts of the Kalashnikovs.

“Djoko?” Schneider coughed again. “That you, Djoko?”

More silence. The dust had settled enough for me to make out the dull glint of metal on gun barrels and the enhanced vision masks they all wore. There was room for body armour beneath the loose desert gear.

“Djoko, quit fucking about.”

A high-pitched, impossible laugh from the towering, misshapen figure in the centre. I blinked.

“Jan, Jan, my good friend.” It was the voice of a child. “Do I make you so nervous?”

“What do you think, fuckwit?” Schneider stepped forward and as I watched the huge figure spasmed and seemed to break apart. Startled, I cranked up the neurachem vision and made out a small boy of about eight scrambling down from the arms of the man who held him to his chest. As the boy reached the ground and ran to meet Schneider, I saw the man who had carried him straighten up into a peculiar immobility. Something quickened along the tendons in my arms. I screwed up my eyes some more and scanned the now unremarkable figure head to foot. This one was not wearing the EV mask and his face was…

I felt my mouth tighten as I realised what I was looking at.

Schneider and the boy were trading complicated handshakes and spouting gibberish at each other. Midway through this ritual, the boy broke off and took Tanya Wardani’s hand with a formal bow and some ornate flattery that I didn’t catch. He seemed insistent an clowning his way through the meeting. He was spouting harmlessness like a tinsel fountain on Harlan’s Day. And with the worst of the dust down where it belonged, the rest of the reception committee had lost the vague menace their silhouettes had given them. The clearing air revealed them as an assortment of nervous-looking and mostly young irregulars. I saw one wispy-bearded Caucasian on the left chewing his lip below the blank calm of the EV mask. Another was shifting from foot to foot. All of them had their weapons slung or stowed and as I jumped down from the hatch, they all flinched backward.

I raised my hands soothingly shoulder height, palms outward.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to this idiot.” Schneider was now trying to cuff the boy around the back of the head, with limited success. “Djoko, come here and say hello to a real live Envoy. This is Takeshi Kovacs. He was at Innenin.”

“Indeed?” The boy came and offered his hand. Dark-skinned and fine-boned, it was already a handsome sleeve—in later life it would be androgynously beautiful. It was dressed immaculately in a tailored mauve sarong and matching quilted jacket. “Djoko Roespinoedji, at your service. I apologise for the drama, but one cannot be too careful in these uncertain times. Your call came in on satellite frequencies that no one outside Carrera’s Wedge have access to and Jan, while I love him like a brother, is not known for his connections in high places. It could have been a trap.”

“Mothballed scrambler uplink,” said Schneider importantly. “We stole it from the Wedge. This time, Djoko, when I say I’m jacked in, I mean it.”

“Who might be trying to trap you?” I asked.

“Ah.” The boy sighed with a world-weariness several decades out of place in his voice. “There is no telling. Government agencies, the Cartel, corporate leverage analysts, Kempist spies. None of them have any reason to love Djoko Roespinoedji. Remaining neutral in a war does not save you from making enemies as it should. Rather, it loses you any friends you might have and earns you suspicion and contempt from all sides.”

“The war isn’t this far south yet,” Wardani pointed out.

Djoko Roespinoedji placed a hand gravely on his chest. “For which we are all extremely grateful. But these days, not being on the front line merely means you are under occupation of one form or another. Landfall is barely eight hundred kilometres to our west. We are close enough to be considered a perimeter post, which means a state militia garrison and periodic visits from the Cartel’s political assessors.” He sighed again. “It is all very costly.”

I looked at him suspiciously. “You’re garrisoned? Where are they?”

“Over there.” The boy jerked a thumb at the ragged group of irregulars. “Oh, there are a few more back at the uplink bunker, as per regulations, but essentially what you see here is the garrison.”

“That’s the state militia?” asked Tanya Wardani.

“It is.” Roespinoedji looked sadly at them for a moment, then turned back to us. “Of course, when I said it was costly, I was referring mostly to the cost of making the political assessor’s visits congenial. For us and for him, that is. The assessor is not a very sophisticated man, but he does have substantial, um, appetites. And of course ensuring that he remains our political assessor displaces a certain amount of expenditure too. Generally they are rotated every few months.”

“Is he here now?”

“I would hardly have invited you here if he were. He left only last week.” The boy leered, unnerving to watch on a face that young. “Satisfied, you might say, with what he found here.”

I found myself smiling. I couldn’t help it.

“I think we’ve come to the right place.”

“Well that will depend on what you came for,” said Roespinoedji, glancing at Schneider. “Jan was far from explicit. But come. Even in Dig 27 there are more congenial places than this to discuss business.”

He led us back to the little group of waiting militiamen and made a sharp clucking sound with his tongue. The figure who had been carrying him before stooped awkwardly and picked him up. Behind me, I heard Tanya Wardani’s breath catch slightly as she saw what had been done to the man.

It was by no means the worst thing I’d ever seen happen to a human being, wasn’t in fact even the worst I’d seen recently; still there was something eerie about the ruined head and the silvery alloy cement that had been used to patch it together. If I’d had to guess, I would have said this sleeve had been struck by flying shrapnel. Any land of deliberate, directional weapon just wouldn’t have left anything to work with. But someone somewhere had taken the trouble to repair the dead man’s skull, seal up the remaining gaps with resin and replace the eyeballs with photoreceptors that sat in the gutted sockets like cyclopic silver spiders waiting for prey. Then, presumably, they’d coaxed enough life back into the brainstem to operate the body’s vegetative systems and basic motor functions, and maybe respond to a few programmed commands.

Back before I got shot up on the Rim, I’d had a Wedge noncom working with me whose Afro-Caribbean sleeve was actually his own. One night, waiting out a satellite bombardment in the ruins of some kind of temple, he’d told me one of the myths his people, in chains, had taken across an ocean on Earth, and later, in hope of a new beginning, across the gulfs of the Martian astrogation charts to the world that would later become known as Latimer. It was a story of magicians and the slaves they made of bodies raised from the dead. I forget what name he gave to these creatures in the story, but I know he would have seen one in the thing that held Djoko Roespinoedji in its arms.

“Do you like it?” The boy, cuddled up obscenely close to the ravaged head, had been watching me.

“Not much, no.”

“Well, aesthetically, of course…” The boy let his voice trail off delicately. “But with judicious use of bandaging, and some suitably ragged clothing for me, we should make a truly pitiful ensemble. The wounded and the innocent, fleeing from the ruins of their shattered lives—ideal camouflage, really, should things become extreme.”

“Same old Djoko,” Schneider came up and nudged me. “Like I told you. Always one step ahead of the action.”

I shrugged. “I’ve known refugee columns get gunned down just for target practice.”

“Oh, I’m aware of that. Our friend here was a tactical marine before he met his unfortunate end. Still quite a lot of ingrained reflex left in the cortex, or wherever it is they store that kind of thing.” The boy winked at me. “I’m a businessman, not a technician. I had a software firm in Landfall knock what was left into usable shape. Look.”

The child’s hand disappeared into his jacket and the dead man snatched a long-barrelled blaster from the scabbard across his back. It was very fast. The photoreceptors whirred audibly in their sockets, scanning left to right. Roespinoedji grinned broadly and his hand emerged clutching the remote. A thumb shifted and the blaster was returned smoothly to its sheath. The arm supporting the boy had not shifted an inch.

“So you see,” the boy piped cheerfully, “where pity cannot be mined, less subtle options are always available. But really, I’m optimistic. You’d be surprised how many soldiers still find it difficult to shoot small children, even in these troubled times. Now. Enough chatter, shall we eat?”

Roespinoedji had the top floor and penthouse of a raddled warehouse block not far off touching distance from the tail of the dighead. We left all but two of the militia escort outside in the street and picked our way through cool gloom to where an industrial elevator stood in one corner. The animated dead man dragged the cage door aside with one hand. Metallic echoes chased around the empty space over our heads.

“I can remember,” said the boy as we rose towards the roof, “when all this was stacked with grade-one artefacts, crated and tagged for airlift to Landfall. The inventory crews used to work shifts round the clock. The dighead never stopped, you could hear it running day and night under all the other sounds. Like a heartbeat.”

“Is that what you used to do?” asked Wardani. “Stack artefacts?”

I saw Schneider smile to himself in the gloom.

“When I was younger,” said Roespinoedji, self-mocking. “But I was involved in a more, organisational capacity, shall we say?”

The elevator passed through the roof of the storage area and clanged to a halt in suddenly bright light. Sunlight strained through fabric-curtained windows into a reception lounge screened from the rest of the floor by amber-painted internal walls. Through the elevator cage I saw kaleidoscopic designs on carpets, dark wood flooring and long, low sofas arranged around what I took to be a small, internally-lit swimming pool. Then, as we stepped out, I saw that the floor recess held not water but a wide horizontal video screen on which a woman appeared to be singing. In two corners of the lounge, the image was duplicated in a more viewable format on two vertical stacks of more reasonably sized screens. The far wall held a long table on which someone had laid out enough food and drink for a platoon.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Roespinoedji, as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. “I’ll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.”

The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognisable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit Open Ground that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic sub-orgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.

Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up station near the elevator, shrugged and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there

“Told you,” said Schneider to me. “If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He’s interfaced with every player in Landfall.”

“You mean he was before the war.”

Schneider shook his head. “Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn’t still jacked into the machine.”

“If he’s jacked into the machine,” I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, “how come he’s living in this shithole town?”

“Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now that’s a shithole.”

Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn’t.

“Let’s wait,” I said softly. “It’s only polite.”

He snorted. “What do you think; he’s going to poison us? What for? There’s no angle in it.”

But he left the food alone.

The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitised, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, rebel operations neutralised.

Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.

“Ivanna and Kas,” he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. “My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn’t you say? Or two. Now,” he snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself in an adjacent sofa. “To business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?”

“You’re not eating?” I asked him.

“Oh.” He smiled and gestured at his two companions. “Well, they are, and I’m really very fond of both of them.”

Schneider looked embarrassed.

“No?” Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. “There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?”

“We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.” Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. “Knockdown price.”

“Indeed?”

“Yeah—call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-70, very little wear and no previous owner of record.”

Roespinoedji smiled. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Check it if you like.” Schneider swallowed his mouthful. “The datacore’s wiped cleaner than your tax records, six hundred thousand klick range. Universal config, hard space, suborbital, submarine. Handles like a whorehouse harpy.”

“Yes, I seem to remember the seventies were impressive. Or was it you that told me that, Jan?” The boy stroked his beardless chin in a gesture that clearly belonged to a previous sleeve. “Never mind. This knockdown bargain comes armed, I assume.”

Schneider nodded, chewing. “Micromissile turret, nose-mounted. Plus evasion systems. Full autodefensive software, very nice package.”

I coughed on a pastry.

The two women drifted over to the sofa where Roespinoedji sat and arranged themselves in decorative symmetry on either side of him. Neither of them had said a word or made a sound that I could detect since they walked in. The woman on Roespinoedji’s left began to feed him from her plate. He leaned back against her and eyed me speculatively while he chewed what she gave him.

“Alright,” he said finally. “Six million.”

“UN?” asked Schneider, and Roespinoedji laughed out loud.

“Saft. Six million saft.”

The Standard Archaeological Find Token, created back when the Sanction government was still little more than a global claims administrator, and now an unpopular global currency whose performance against the Latimer franc it had replaced was reminiscent of a swamp panther trying to climb a fricfree-treated dock ramp. There were currently about two hundred and thirty saft to the Protectorate (UN) dollar.

Schneider was aghast, his haggler’s soul outraged. “You cannot be serious, Djoko. Even six million UN’s only about half what it’s worth. It’s a Wu Morrison, man.”

“Does it have cryocaps?”

“Uhhh… No.”

“So what the fuck use is it to me, Jan?” Roespinoedji asked without heat. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right, and she passed him a wineglass without a word. “Look, at this precise moment the only use anyone outside the military has for a space rig is as a means of lifting out of here, beating the blockade and getting back to Latimer. That six-hundred-thousand-kilometre range can be modified by someone who knows what they’re doing, and the Wu Morrisons have goodish guidance systems, I know, but at the speed you’ll get out of an ISN-70, especially backyard customised, it’s still the best part of three decades back to Latimer. You need cryocapsules for that.” He held up a hand to forestall Schneider’s protest. “And I don’t know anyone, anyone, who can get cryocaps. Not for cunt nor credit. The Landfall Cartel know what they’re about, Jan, and they’ve got it all welded shut. No one gets out of here alive—not until the war’s over. That’s the deal.”

“You can always sell to the Kempists,” I said. “They’re pretty desperate for the hardware, they’ll pay.”

Roespinoedji nodded. “Yes, Mr. Kovacs, they will pay, and they’ll pay in saft. Because it’s all they’ve got. Your friends in the Wedge have seen to that.”

“Not my friends. I’m just wearing this.”

“Rather well, though.”

I shrugged.

“What about ten,” said Schneider hopefully. “Kemp’s paying five times that for reconditioned suborbitals.”

Roespinoedji sighed. “Yes, and in the meantime I have to hide it somewhere, and pay off anyone who sees it. It’s not a dune scooter, you know. Then I have to make contact with the Kempists, which as you may be aware carries a mandatory erasure penalty these days. I have to arrange a covert meeting, oh and with armed back-up in case these toy revolutionaries decide to requisition my merchandise instead of paying up. Which they often do if you don’t come heavy. Look at the logistics, Jan. I’m doing you a favour, just taking it off your hands. Who else were you going to go to?”

“Eight—”

“Six is fine,” I cut in swiftly. “And we appreciate the favour. But how about you sweeten our end with a ride into Landfall and a little free information? Just to show we’re all friends.”

The boy’s gaze sharpened and he glanced towards Tanya Wardani.

“Free information, eh?” He raised his eyebrows, twice in quick succession, clownishly. “Of course there’s really no such thing, you know. But just to show we’re all friends. What do you want to know?”

“Landfall.” I said. “Outside of the Cartel, who are the razorfish? I’m talking about second-rank corporates, maybe even third rank. Who’s tomorrow’s shiny new dream at the moment?”

Roespinoedji sipped meditatively at his wine. “Hmm. Razorfish. I don’t believe we have any of those on Sanction IV. Or Latimer, come to that.”

“I’m from Harlan’s World.”

“Oh, really. Not a Quellist, I assume.” He gestured at the Wedge uniform. “Given your current political alignment, I mean.”

“You don’t want to oversimplify Quellism. Kemp keeps quoting her, but like most people he’s selective.”

“Well, I really wouldn’t know.” Roespinoedji put up one hand to block the next piece of food his concubine was readying for him. “But your razorfish. I’d say you’ve got a half dozen at most. Late arrivals, most of them Latimer-based. The interstellars blocked out most of the local competition until about twenty years ago. And now of course they’ve got the Cartel and the government in their pocket. There’s not much more than scraps for everybody else. Most of the third rank are getting ready to go home; they can’t really afford the war.” He stroked at his imagined beard. “Second rank, well… Sathakarn Yu Associates maybe, PKN, the Mandrake Corporation. They’re all pretty carnivorous. Might be a couple more I can dig out for you. Are you planning to approach these people with something?”

I nodded. “Indirectly.”

“Yes, well, some free advice to go with your free information, then. Feed it to them on a long stick.” Roespinoedji raised his glass towards me and then drained it. He smiled affably. “Because if you don’t, they’ll take your hand off at the shoulder.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Like a lot of cities that owe their existence to a spaceport, Landfall had no real centre. Instead it sprawled haphazardly across a broad semi-desert plain in the southern hemisphere where the original colony barges had touched down a century ago. Each corporation holding stock in the venture had simply built its own landing field somewhere on the plain and surrounded it with a ring of ancillary structures. In time those rings had spread outwards, met each other and eventually merged into a warren of acentric conurbation with only the vaguest of overall planning to link it all together. Secondary investors moved in, renting or buying space from the primaries and carving themselves niches in both the market and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Meanwhile, other cities arose elsewhere on the globe, but the Export Quarantine clause in the Charter ensured that all the wealth generated by Sanction IVs archaeological industries had at some point to pass through Landfall. Gorged on an unrestricted diet of artefact export, land allocation and dig licensing, the former spaceport had swelled to monstrous proportions. It now covered two-thirds of the plain and, with twelve million inhabitants, was home to almost thirty per cent of what was left of Sanction IVs total population.

It was a pit.

I walked with Schneider through badly-kept streets full of urban detritus and reddish desert sand. The air was hot and dry and the shade cast by the blocks on either side provided little respite from the high-angled rays of the sun. I could feel sweat beading on my face and soaking the hair at the back of my neck. In windows and mirror-shielded frontages along the way, our black-uniformed reflections kept pace. I was almost glad of the company. There was no one else out in the midday heat and the shimmering stillness of it was uncanny. The sand crunched audibly underfoot.

The place we were looking for wasn’t hard to find. It stuck up at the edge of the district like a burnished bronze conning tower, double the height of the surrounding blocks and utterly featureless from the outside. Like much of the architecture in Landfall, it was mirror-surfaced and the reflected sun made its edges difficult to look at directly. It wasn’t the tallest tower in Landfall, but the structure had a raw power to it that throbbed across the surrounding urban sprawl and spoke volumes about its designers.

Testing the human frame to destruction

The phrase flopped out of my memory like a corpse from a closet.

“How close you want to get?” asked Schneider nervously.

“A bit closer.”

The Khumalo sleeve, like all Carrera’s Wedge custom, had a satdata locational display wired in as standard and reckoned to be quite user-friendly when not fucked up by the webs of jamming and counter-jamming that currently swathed most of Sanction IV. Blinked up to focus now, it gave me a mesh of streets and city blocks covering my whole left field of vision. Two tagged dots pulsed minutely on a thoroughfare.

Testing the—

I overcued the tightlock fractionally and the view dizzied up until I was looking at the top of my own head from block-top height.

“Shit.”

“What?” Beside me, Schneider had tensed up in what he obviously imagined was a stance of ninja combat readiness. Behind his sunlenses, he looked comically worried.

Testing—

“Forget it.” I scaled back up until the tower re-emerged on the edge of the display. A shortest-possible route lit up obligingly in yellow, threading us to the building through a pair of intersections. “This way.”

Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines

A couple of minutes down the yellow line, one of the streets gave onto a narrow suspension bridge over a dry canal. The bridge sloped upward slightly along its twenty-metre length to meet a raised concrete flange on the far side. Two other bridges paralleled the crossing a hundred metres down on either side, also sloping upward. The floor of the canal bore a scattering of the debris any urban area will breed—discarded domestic devices spilling circuitry from cracked casings, emptied food packages and sun-bleached knots of cloth that reminded me of machine-gunned bodies. Over it all and on the other side of this dumping ground, the tower waited.

Testing the human

Schneider hovered on the threshold of the bridge.

“You going across?”

“Yeah, and so are you. We’re partners, remember.” I shoved him lightly in the small of the back and followed up so close he’d have to go on. There was a slightly hysterical good humour brewing in me as the Envoy conditioning strove to fend off the unsubtle doses of combat prep hormones my sleeve sensed were required.

“I just don’t think this is—”

“If anything goes wrong, you can blame me.” I nudged him again. “Now come on.”

“If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dead,” he muttered morosely.

“Yeah, at least.”

We crossed, Schneider holding onto the rails as if the bridge were swaying in a high wind.

The flange on the other side turned out to be the edge of a featureless fifty-metre access plaza. We stood two metres in, looking up at the impassive face of the tower. Whether intentionally or not, whoever had built the concrete apron around the building’s base had created a perfect killing field. There was no cover in any direction and the only retreat was back along the slim, exposed bridge or a bone-shattering jump into the empty canal.

“Open ground, all around,” sang Schneider under his breath, picking up on the cadence and lyrics of the Kempist revolutionary hymn of the same name. I couldn’t blame him. I’d caught myself humming the fucking thing a couple of times since we got into the unjammed airspace around the city—the Lapinee version was everywhere, close enough to the Kempist original to activate recall from last year. Back then, you could hear the original playing on the Rebel’s propaganda channels whenever and wherever the government jamming went down. Telling the—apparently edifying—story of a doomed platoon of volunteers holding a position against overwhelming odds for love of Joshua Kemp and his revolution, the anthem was sung against a catchy junk salsa backdrop that tended to stick in your head. Most of my men in the Northern Rim assault force could sing it by heart, and often did, to the fury of Cartel political officers, who were mostly too scared of the Wedge uniforms to make something of it.

In fact, the melody had proven so virulently memetic that even the most solidly pro-corporate citizens were unable to resist absent-mindedly humming it. This, plus a network of Cartel informers working on a commission-only basis, was enough to ensure that penal facilities all over Sanction IV were soon overflowing with musically-inclined political offenders. In view of the strain this put on policing, an expensive consulting team was called in and rapidly came up with a new set of sanitised lyrics to fit the original melody. Lapinee, a construct vocalist, was designed and launched to front the replacement song, which told the story of a young boy, orphaned in a Kempist sneak raid but then adopted by a kindly corporate bloc and brought up to realise his full potential as a top-level planetary executive.

As a ballad, it lacked the romantic blood and glory elements of the original, but since certain of the Kempist lyrics had been mirrored with malice aforethought, people generally lost track of which song was which and just sang a mangled hybrid of both, sewn together with much salsa-based humming. Any revolutionary sentiments got thoroughly scrambled in the process. The consulting team got a bonus, plus spin-off royalties from Lapinee, who was currently being plugged on all state channels. An album was in the offing.

Schneider stopped his humming. “Think they’ve got it covered?”

“Reckon so.” I nodded towards the base of the tower, where burnished doors fully five metres high apparently gave access. The massive portal was flanked by two plinths on which stood examples of abstract art each worthy of the title Eggs Collide in Symmetry or—I racked up the neurachem to be sure—Overkill Hardware Semi-deployed.

Schneider followed my gaze. “Sentries?”

I nodded. “Two slug autocannon nests and at least four separate beam weapons that I can see from here. Very tastefully done, too. You’d barely notice them in amongst all that sculpture.”

In a way, it was a good sign.

In the two weeks we’d spent in Landfall so far, I hadn’t seen much sign of the war beyond a slightly higher uniform count on the streets in the evenings and the occasional cyst of a rapid response turret on some of the taller buildings. Most of the time, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening on another planet. But if Joshua Kemp did finally manage to fight his way through to the capital, the Mandrake Corporation at least looked to be ready for him.

Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines central to the Mandrake Corporation’s current research programme. Maximum utility for ALL resources is our ultimate goal.

Mandrake had only acquired the site a decade ago. That they had built with armed insurrection in mind showed strategic thinking way in advance of any of the other corporate players at this particular table. Their corporate logo was a chopped strand of DNA afloat on a background of circuitry, their publicity material was just the right side of shrill in its aggressive, more-for-your-investment-dollar new-kid-on-the-block pitch, and their fortunes had risen sharply with the war.

Good enough.

“Think they’re looking at us now?”

I shrugged. “Always someone looking at you. Fact of life. Question is whether they noticed us.”

Schneider pulled an exasperated face. “Think they noticed us, then?”

“I doubt it. The automated systems won’t be tuned for it. War’s too far off for emergency default settings. These are friendly uniforms, and curfew isn’t till ten. We’re nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” I agreed, turning away. “So let’s go and get noticed.”

We headed back across the bridge.

“You don’t look like artists,” said the promoter as he punched in the last of our encoding sequence. Out of uniform and into nondescript civilian clothing bought that morning, we’d been calibrated the moment we walked in the door and, by the look of it, found lacking.

“We’re security,” I told him pleasantly. “She’s the artist.”

His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.

“Well.” He maximised a traffic display and studied it for a moment. “I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.”

“What, like Lapinee?”

The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.

“Don’t laugh at the majors, friend,” he said easily. “I had even a two per cent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now,” he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired. “Whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty fucking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.”

“Are you this positive with all your clients?” I asked him.

He smiled bleakly. “I’m a realist. You pay me, I’ll shunt it. Got the best anti-screening intrusion software in Landfall to get it there in one piece. Just like the sign says. We Get You Noticed. But don’t expect me to massage your ego too, because that isn’t part of the service. Where you want this squirted, there’s too much going on to be optimistic about your chances.”

At our backs, a pair of windows were open onto the noise of the street three floors below. The air outside had cooled with the onset of evening, but the atmosphere in the promoter’s office still tasted stale. Tanya Wardani shifted impatiently.

“It’s a niche thing,” she rasped. “Can we get on with this.”

“Sure.” The promoter glanced once more at the credit screen and the payment that floated there in hard green digits. “Better fasten your launch belts. This is going to cost you at speed.”

He hit the switch. There was a brief ripple across the display and the purple torpedo vanished. I caught a glimpse of it represented on a series of helix-based transmission visuals, and then it faded, swallowed behind the wall of corporate data security systems and presumably beyond the tracking capacity of the promoter’s much-vaunted software. The green digit counters whirled into frantic, blurred eights.

“Told you,” said the promoter, shaking his head judiciously. “High-line screening systems like that, would have cost them a year’s profits just for the installation. And cutting the high line costs, my friends.”

“Evidently.” I watched our credit decay like an unprotected antimatter core and quelled a sudden desire to remove the promoter’s throat with my bare hands. It wasn’t really the money; we had plenty of that. Six million saft might have been a poor price for a Wu Morrison shuttle, but it was going to be enough for us to live like kings for the duration of our stay in Landfall.

It wasn’t the money.

It was the designer fashion war gear and the drawled theories on what to do with wartime art, the fake seen-it/been-it worldweariness, while on the other side of the equator men and women blew each other apart in the name of minor adjustments to the system that kept Landfall fed.

“That’s it.” The promoter played a brisk drumroll across his console with both hands. “Gone home, near as I can tell. Time for you boys and girls to do the same.”

“Near as you can tell,” said Schneider. “What the fuck is that?”

He got the bleak smile again. “Hey. Read your contract. To the best of our ability, we deliver. And that’s to the best of anyone else’s ability on Sanction IV. You bought state of the art, you didn’t buy any guarantees.”

He ejected our eviscerated credit chip from the machine and tossed it onto the table in front of Tanya Wardani, who pocketed it, deadpan.

“So how long do we wait?” she asked through a yawn.

“What am I, clairvoyant?” The promoter sighed. “Could be quick, like a couple of days, could be a month or more. All depends on the demo, and I didn’t see that. I’m just the mailman. Could be never. Go home, I’ll mail you.”

We left, seen out with the same studied disinterest with which we’d been received and processed. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street and found a terrace café about twenty metres up from the promoter’s garish third-floor display holo. This close to curfew, it was almost deserted. We dumped our bags under a table and ordered short coffees.

“How long?” Wardani asked again.

“Thirty minutes.” I shrugged. “Depends on their AI. Forty-five, the outside.”

I still hadn’t finished my coffee when they came.

The cruiser was an unobtrusive brown utility vehicle, ostensibly bulky and underpowered but to a tutored eye very obviously armoured. It slunk round a corner a hundred metres up the street at ground level and crawled down towards the promoter’s building.

“Here we go,” I murmured, wisps of Khumalo neurachem flickering into life up and down my body. “Stay here, both of you.”

I stood up unhurriedly and drifted across the street, hands in pockets, head cocked at a rubbernecker’s angle. Ahead of me the cruiser floated to a curb hugging halt outside the promoter’s door and a side hatch hinged up. I watched as five coverall-clad figures climbed out and then vanished into the building with a telltale economy of motion. The hatch folded back down.

I picked up speed fractionally as I made my way among the hurrying last-minute shoppers on the pavement, and my left hand closed around the thing in my pocket.

The cruiser’s windscreen was solid-looking and almost opaque. Behind it, my neurachem-aided vision could just distinguish two figures in the seats and the hint of another body bulking behind them, braced upright to peer out. I glanced sideways at a shop frontage, closing the last of the gap up to the front of the cruiser.

And time.

Less than half a metre, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disc of the termite grenade hard against the windscreen and stepped immediately aside and past.

Crack!

With termite grenades you’ve got to get out of the way quickly. The new ones are designed to deliver all their shrapnel and better than ninety-five per cent of their force to the contact face, but the five per cent that comes out on the opposite side will still make a mess of you if you stand in the way.

The cruiser shuddered from end to end. Contained within the armoured body, the sound of the explosion was reduced to a muffled crump. I ducked in through the door to the promoter’s building and went up the stairs at a run.

At the first floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.

They’d posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren’t expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs—splash of blood and paler tissue in clots across the wall in front of him—made the landing before he’d hit the ground and then erupted around the corner of the promoter’s office door.

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whisky, burning…

Splinters of vision…

The promoter tries to rise from his seat where two of them have him pinned and tilted back. One arm thrashes free and points in my direction.

“That’s hi—”

The goon nearest the door, turning…

Cut him down. Three-shot burst, left-handed.

Blood splatters the air—I twist, neurachem hyperswift, to avoid it.

The squad leader—recognisable, somehow. Taller, more presence, something, yelling, “What the fu—”

Body shots. Chest and weapon arm, get that firing hand wrecked.

The right-hand Kalashnikov spurts flame and softcore anti-personnel slugs.

Two left, trying to shrug themselves free of the half-pinioned, flailing promoter, to clear weapons that…

Both hands now—head, body, anywhere.

The Kalashnikovs bark like excited dogs.

Bodies jerking, tumbling…

And done.

Silence slammed down in the tiny office. The promoter cowered under the body of one of his slain captors. Somewhere, something sparked and shorted out in the console—damage from one of my slugs that had gone wide or through. I could hear voices out on the landing.

I knelt beside the wreckage of the lead goon’s corpse and set down the smart guns. Beneath my jacket, I tugged the vibroknife from its sheath in the small of my back and activated the motor. With my free hand I pressed down hard on the dead man’s spine and started cutting.

“Ah, fuck, man.” The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. “Fuck, fuck.”

I looked up at him.

“Shut up, this isn’t easy.”

He ducked down again.

After a couple of false starts, the vibroknife took and sliced down through the spinal column a few vertebrae below the point where it met the base of the skull. I steadied the skull against the floor with one knee, then pressed down again and started a new incision. The knife slipped and slithered again on the curve of the bone.

“Shit.”

The voices out on the landing were growing in number and, it seemed, creeping closer. I stopped what I was doing, picked up one of the Kalashnikovs left-handed and fired a brace of shots out of the doorway into the wall opposite. The voices departed in a stampede of feet on stairs.

Back to the knife. I managed to get the point lodged, cut through the bone, and then used the blade to lever the severed section of spine up out of the surrounding flesh and muscle. Messy, but there wasn’t a lot of time. I stuffed the severed bone into a pocket, wiped my hands on a clean portion of the dead man’s tunic and sheathed the knife. Then I picked up the smart guns and went cautiously to the door.

Quiet.

As I was leaving, I glanced back at the promoter. He was staring at me as if I’d just sprouted a reef demon’s fangs.

“Go home,” I told him. “They’ll be back. Near as I can tell.”

I made it down the three flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though I could feel eyes peering from other doors on the landings I passed. Outside, I scanned the street in both directions, stowed the Kalashnikovs and slipped away, past the hot, smouldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty metres in both directions and the frontages on either side of the wreck had all cranked down their security blinds. A crowd was gathering on the other side of the street, but no one seemed to know what exactly to do. The few passers-by who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed. Immaculate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nobody said much on the way to the hotel.

We did most of it on foot, doubling back through covered ways and malls to blind any satellite eyes the Mandrake Corporation might have access to. Breathless work, weighed down with the carryall bags. Twenty minutes of this found us under the broad eaves of a refrigerated storage facility, where I waved a transport pager at the sky and eventually succeeded in flagging down a cab. We climbed in without leaving the cover of the eaves and sank back into the seats without a word.

“It is my duty to inform you,” the machine told us prissily, “that in seventeen minutes you will be in breach of curfew.”

“Better get us home quick then,” I said and gave it the address.

“Estimated trajectory time nine minutes. Please insert payment.”

I nodded at Schneider, who produced an unused credit chip and fed it to the slot. The cab chittered and we lifted smoothly into a night sky almost devoid of traffic before sliding off westward. I rolled my head sideways on the back of the seat and watched the lights of the city pass beneath us for a while, mentally backtracking to see how well we’d covered ourselves.

When I rolled my head back again, I caught Tanya Wardani staring straight at me. She didn’t look away.

I went back to watching the lights until we started to fall back towards them.

The hotel was well chosen, the cheapest of a row built under a commercial freight overpass and used almost exclusively by prostitutes and wireheads. The desk clerk was sleeved in a cheap Syntheta body whose silicoflesh was showing signs of wear around the knuckles and had a very obvious re-upholstering graft halfway up the right arm. The desk was heavily stained in a number of places and nubbed every ten centimetres along its outer edge with shield generators. In the corners of the dimly-lit lobby, empty-faced women and boys flickered about wanly, like flames almost out.

The desk clerk’s logo-scribbled eyes passed over us like a damp cloth.

“Ten saft an hour, fifty deposit up front. Shower and screen access is another fifty.”

“We want it for the night,” Schneider told him. “Curfew just came down, case you hadn’t noticed.”

The clerk stayed expressionless, but then maybe that was the sleeve. Syntheta have been known to skimp on the smaller facial nerve/muscle interfaces.

“Then that’ll be eighty saft, plus fifty deposit. Shower and screen fifty extra.”

“No discount for long-stay guests?”

His eyes switched to me, and one hand disappeared below the counter. I felt the neurachem surge, still jumpy after the firefight.

“You want the room or not?”

“We want it,” said Schneider with a warning glance at me. “You got a chip reader?”

“That’s ten per cent extra.” He seemed to search his memory for something. “Handling surcharge.”

“Fine.”

The clerk propped himself to his feet, disappointed, and went to fetch the reader from a room in back.

“Cash,” murmured Wardani. “We should have thought of that.”

Schneider shrugged. “Can’t think of everything. When was the last time you paid for something without a chip?”

She shook her head. I thought back briefly to a time three decades gone and a place light years distant where for a while I’d used tactile currency instead of credit. I’d even got used to the quaint plastified notes with their ornate designs and holographic panels. But that was on Earth, and Earth is a place straight out of a pre-colonial period experia flick. For a while there I’d even thought I was in love and, motivated by love and hate in about equal proportions, I’d done some stupid things. A part of me had died on Earth.

Another planet, another sleeve.

I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.

Thoughts for a brothel lobby. Ye Gods.

The desk clerk came back, read one of Schneider’s chips and banged a scarred plastic key card on the counter.

“Through the back and down the stairs. Fourth level. I’ve activated the shower and screen till curfew break. You want any of it longer, you’ll need to come up and pay again.” The silicoflesh face flexed in what was probably supposed to be a grin. He shouldn’t have bothered. “Rooms are all soundproofed. Do what you like.”

The corridor and steel frame stairwell were, if anything, worse lit than the lobby. In places the illuminum tiles were peeling off the walls and ceiling. Elsewhere they had just gone out. The stair rail was painted luminous but that too was fading, coming off microns at a time with every hand that gripped and slid along the metal.

We passed a scattering of whores on the stairs, most with customers in tow. Little bubbles of fake hilarity floated around them, tinkling. Business seemed to be brisk. I spotted a couple of uniforms among the clientéle, and what looked like a Cartel political officer leant on the second level landing rail, smoking pensively. No one gave us a second glance.

The room was long and low-ceilinged with a quickmould resin cornice-and-pillar effect epoxied onto the raw concrete walls, the whole then painted in violent primary red. About halfway down, two bedshelves jutted out from opposing walls with a half metre of space between their adjacent sides. The second bed had plastic chains moulded into the four corners of the shelf. At the far end of the room stood a self-contained shower stall wide enough to take three bodies at a time, should the occasion so require. Opposite each bed was a wide screen with a menu display glowing on a pale pink background.

I looked around, puffed a single breath out into blood-warm air and then stooped to the carryall at my feet.

“Make sure that door’s secured.”

I pulled the sweeper unit out of the bag and waved it around the room. Three bugs showed up in the ceiling, one above each bed and one in the shower. Very imaginative. Schneider snapped a Wedge standard limpet neutraliser onto the ceiling next to each one. They’d get into the bugs’ memories, pull out whatever had been stored there over the last couple of hours and then recycle it endlessly. The better models will even scan the content and then generate plausible improvised scenes from stock, but I didn’t think that was going to be necessary here. The desk clerk had not given the impression that he was fronting a high-security operation.

“Where do you want this stuff?” Schneider asked Wardani, unpacking one of the other carryalls onto the first bed shelf.

“Right there is fine,” she said. “Here, I’ll do it. It’s, uhm, complicated.”

Schneider raised an eyebrow. “Right. Fine. I’ll just watch.”

Complicated or not, it only took the archaeologue about ten minutes to assemble her equipment. When she was done, she took a pair of modified EV goggles from the flaccid skin of the empty carryall and settled them over her head. She turned to me.

“You want to give me that?”

I reached into my jacket and produced the segment of spine. There were still fresh streaks of gore clinging to the tiny bumps and crannies of the bone, but she took it without apparent revulsion and dumped it into the top of the artefact scrubber she’d just finished snapping together. A pale violet light sprang up under the glass hood. Schneider and I watched fascinated as she jacked the goggles into one side of the machine, picked up the connected handset and settled cross-legged to work. From within the machine came tiny crackling sounds.

“Working alright?” I asked.

She grunted.

“How long is this going to take?”

“Longer, if you keep asking me stupid questions,” she said without looking away from what she was doing. “Don’t you have anything else to do?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Schneider grinning.

By the time we’d put together the other machine, Wardani was almost done. I peered over her shoulder into the purple glow and saw what remained of the spinal segment. Most of it was gone, and the final pieces of vertebrae were being eaten away from the tiny metal cylinder of the cortical stack. I watched, fascinated. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a cortical stack removed from a dead spine, but it had to be amongst the most elegant versions of the operation I’d ever witnessed. The bone retreated, vanishing one minute increment at a time as Tanya Wardani cut it away with her tools, and the stack casing emerged scrubbed clean of surrounding tissue and shiny as new tin.

“I do know what I’m doing, Kovacs,” Wardani said, voice slow and absent with concentration. “Compared to scrubbing the accretion off Martian circuitboards, this is like sandblasting.”

“I don’t doubt it. I was just admiring your handiwork.”

She did look up then, sharply, pushing, the goggles up on her forehead to see if I was laughing at her. When she saw I wasn’t, she lowered the goggles again, made a couple of adjustments to something on the handset then sat back. The violet light went out.

“It’s done.” She reached into the machine and removed the stack, holding it between thumb and forefinger. “Incidentally, this isn’t great equipment. In fact it’s the sort of thing Scratchers buy for their thesis work. The sensors are pretty crude. I’m going to need a lot better than this up on the Rim.”

“Don’t worry.” I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. “If this works out, they’ll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we’re going to assume he is. That means we’ve got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a casualty ID&A, but cranked up we’ll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.”

“What are you going to do to him?” This was Wardani, looking unhappy.

I reached for the skullcap. “Nothing. There isn’t time. I’m just going to talk to him.”

“Talk?” There was a strange light in her eyes.

“Sometimes,” I told her. “That’s all it takes.”

It was a rough ride in.

Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn’t have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn’t appear until after I’d bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren’t ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we’d liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.

I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to a single-storey wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an AI with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock, and that’s probably exactly what it was.

Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

Time to Identify and Assess.

It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth re-sleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Barcoding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it’s chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.

Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for re-sleeving. How you die—fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony or numb—is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So too does your re-sleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Re-sleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want any more.

Oops.

The point is there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties, but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.

I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiselled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: Deng Zhao Jun. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.

He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realise where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.

I coughed gently.

“Good evening, Deng.”

He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.

“We were set up man, it was a fucking set-up. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—”

His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognised me.

“Yes.”

He jerked to his feet. “Who the fuck are you?”

“That’s not really important. Look—”

But it was too late, he was up and coming for me round the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.

“Look, there’s no point—”

He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and mid-level punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet, and came at me again.

This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knee and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut-deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.

“Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.” I got my breath back and lowered my voice. “Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?”

He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.

“Alright.” I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. “Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilised fashion. I want to ask you some questions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.”

I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.

“You wired for virtual trace?”

He shook his head.

“Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re running a mirror-code scrambler. Now, I want to know who your controller is.”

He stared at me. “Why should I tell you a fucking thing?”

“Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably re-sleeve you.” I leaned forward in the chair. “That’s a one-time special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.”

“If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—”

“No,” I shook my head, “Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.”

Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.

I deployed one from the manual.

“They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hardline outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.” I gestured with one open hand. “But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?”

I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.

Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.

But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.

Try it again.

“Something like that, Deng?”

“You’d better go ahead and kill me,” he said tautly.

I let the smile come out slow—

“I’m not going to kill you, Deng.”

—and waited.

As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.

All the time in the universe.

“You’re—?” he said, finally.

“I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said, I’m. Not. Going to kill you.” I shrugged. “Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don’t get to be a corporate hero that easy.”

I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.

“Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a one-time special offer. Answer the question, now, while you’ve still got the chance.”

“Or what?” Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume thin, but rising.

I shrugged.

“Or I’ll leave you here.”

“What?”

“I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometres of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.”

He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.

“You’re in a Casualty ID&A system. Runs off a battlefield powerpack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.”

I sat back again. Let it sink into him.

“Or you can answer my questions. One-time offer. What’s it going to be?”

The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.

“You had your chance.”

I got almost to the door before he cracked.

“Alright!” There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. “Alright, you got it. You got it.”

I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.

“I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop man. I’ll tell you.”

Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.

“Hand?”

He nodded jerkily.

“Matthias Hand?”

He looked up, something broken in his face. “I got your word?”

“For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.”

“Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.”

“He’s your controller?” I frowned. “A divisional exec?”

“He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the Chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.”

“Why?”

“How the fuck would I know?”

“Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?”

He hesitated. “They say it was Hand.”

“How long’s he been with Mandrake?”

“I don’t know.” He saw the expression on my face. “I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.”

“What’s his rep?”

“Tough. You don’t cross him.”

“Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.”

“It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R&D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—”

“Company what?”

“Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.”

“But it didn’t.”

Deng shook his head. “Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.”

“All that voodoo shit,” I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand were ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. “So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?”

Deng shrugged. “That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cartel by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.”

“Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—”

Falling.

Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.

“You OK, Kovacs?”

Schneider.

I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.

“Kovacs?” This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-moulded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.

“Well?” Wardani drew back a little. “Don’t just sit there grinning. What did you get?”

“Enough,” I said. “I think we’re ready to deal now.”