Broken Angels

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Night sky starscape, piercingly clear.

I looked at it dully for a while, watching a peculiarly fragmented red glow creep up over it from the left edge of my vision, then retreat again.

This ought to mean something to you, Tak.

Like some kind of code, webbed into the way the glow shattered across the rim of my vision, something designed in the way it levered itself up and then sank down again by fractions.

Like glyphs. Like numerals.

And then it did mean something to me, and I felt a cold wave of sweat break across my entire body as I realised where I was.

The red glow was a head-up display, printing out across the bowl of the spacesuit faceplate I was lying trapped beneath.

This is no fucking night sky, Tak.

I was outside.

And then the weight of recall, of personality and past came crashing in on me, like a micrometeorite punching through the thin seal of transparency that was keeping my life in.

I flailed my arms and found I couldn’t move from the wrists up. My fingers groped around a rigid framework under my back, the faint thrum of a motor system. I reached around, twisting my head.

“Hey, he’s coming out of it.”

It was a familiar voice, even through the thin metallic straining of the suit’s comsystem. Someone else chuckled tinnily.

“Are you fucking surprised, man?”

Proximity sense gave me movement at my right side. Above me, I saw another helmet lean in, faceplate darkened to an impenetrable black.

“Hey, lieutenant.” Another voice I knew. “You just won me fifty bucks UN. I told these fucking suitfarts you’d pull through faster than anyone else.”

“Tony?” I managed faintly.

“Hey, no cerebral damage either. Key another one in for 391 platoon, guys. We are fucking immortal.”

They brought us back from the Martian dreadnought like a vacuum commando funeral procession. Seven bodies on powered stretchers, four assault bugs and a twenty-five strong honour guard in full hard space combat rig. Carrera had been taking no chances when he finally deployed to the other side of the gate.

Tony Loemanako took us back through in immaculate style, as if Martian gate-beachheads were something he’d been doing all his professional life. He sent two bugs through first, followed with the stretchers and infantry, commandos peeling off in matched pairs on left and right, and closed it out with the last two bugs retreating through backwards. Suit, stretcher and bug drives all powered up to full grav-lift hover the second they hit Sanction IV’s gravity field and when they grounded a couple of seconds after that, it was unified, on a single raise-and-clench command from Loemanako’s suited fist.

Carrera’s Wedge.

Propped up on the stretcher to the extent that the webbing allowed, I watched the whole thing and tried to damp down the sense of pride and belonging the wolf gene splice wanted me to feel.

“Welcome to base camp, lieutenant,” said Loemanako, dropping his fist to knock gently on my suit’s breastplate. “You’re going to be fine now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

His voice lifted in the comsystem. “Alright, people, let’s move. Mitchell and Kwok, stay suited and keep two of the bugs at standby. The rest of you, hit the shower—we’re done swimming for now. Tan, Sabyrov and Munharto, I want you back here in fifteen, wear what you like but tooled up to keep Kwok and Mitchell company. Everyone else, stand down. Chandra control, could we get some medical attention down here today, please.”

Laughter, rattling through the comset. There was a general loosening of stance around me, visible even through the bulk of vacuum combat gear and the non-reflective black polalloy suits beneath. Weapons went away, folded down, disconnected or simply sheathed. The bug riders climbed off their mounts with the precision of mechanical dolls and followed the general flow of suited bodies away down the beach. Waiting for them at water’s edge, the Wedge battlewagon Angin Chandra’s Virtue bulked on assault landing claws like some prehistoric cross between crocodile and turtle. Her heavily armoured chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.

It was good to see her again.

The beach, now I came to look at it, was a mess. In every direction as far as my limited vision could make out, the sand was torn up and furrowed around the shallow crater of fused glass the Nagini had made when she blew. The blast had taken the bubblefabs with it, leaving nothing but scorchmarks and a sparse few fragments of metal that professional pride told me could not possibly be part of the assault ship itself. The Nagini had airburst, and the explosion would have consumed every molecule of her structure instantaneously. If the ground was for dead people, Schneider had certainly won clear of the crowd. Most of him was probably still up in the stratosphere, dissipating.

What you’re good at, Tak.

The blast seemed to have sunk the trawler too. Twisting my head, I could just make out the stern and heat-mangled superstructure jutting above the water. Memory flickered brightly through my head—Luc Deprez and a bottle of cheap whisky, junk politics and government-banned cigars, Cruickshank leaning over me in—

Don’t do this, Tak.

The Wedge had put up a few items of their own to replace the vaporised camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few metres off the crater on the left, and down by the snout of the battlewagon, I picked out the sealed square cabin and the bulk pressure tanks of the polalloy shower unit. The returning vacuum commandos shucked their heavier items of weaponry on adjacent tent-canopied racks and filed in through the rinse hatch.

From the ‘Chandra came a file of Wedge uniforms with the white shoulder flash of the medical unit. They gathered around the stretchers, powered them up and shunted us off towards one of the bubblefabs. Loemanako touched me on the arm as my stretcher lifted.

“See you later, lieutenant. I’ll drop by once they got you shelled. Got to go and rinse now.”

“Yeah, thanks Tony.”

“Good to see you again, sir.”

In the bubblefab, the medics got us unstrapped and then unsuited, working with brisk, clinical efficiency. By virtue of being conscious, I was a little easier to unpack than the others, but there wasn’t much in it. I’d been without the anti-rad dosing for too long and just bending or lifting each limb took major efforts of will. When they finally got me out of the suit and onto a bed, it was as much as I could do to answer the questions the medic put to me as he ran a series of standard post-combat checks on my sleeve. I managed to keep my eyes jacked half open while he did it, and watched past his shoulder as they ran the same tests on the others. Sun, who was pretty obviously beyond immediate repair, they dumped unceremoniously in a corner.

“So will I live, doc?” I mumbled at one point.

“Not in this sleeve.” Prepping an anti-rad cocktail hypospray as he talked. “But I can keep you going for a while longer, I think. Save you having to talk to the old man in virtual.”

“What does he want, a debriefing?”

“I guess.”

“Well you’d better jack me up with something so I don’t fall asleep on him. Got any ‘meth?”

“I’m not convinced that’s a good idea right now, lieutenant.”

That merited a laugh, dredged up dry from somewhere. “Yeah, you’re right. That stuff’ll ruin my health.”

In the end I had to pull rank on him to get the tetrameth, but he jacked me. I was more or less functional when Carrera walked in.

“Lieutenant Kovacs.”

“Isaac.”

The grin broke across his scarred face like sunrise on crags. He shook his head. “You motherfucker, Kovacs. Do you know how many men I’ve had deployed across this hemisphere looking for you?”

“Probably no more than you can spare.” I propped myself up a little more on the bed. “Were you getting worried?”

“I think you stretched the terms of your commission worse than a squad bitch’s asshole, lieutenant. AWOL two months on a datastack posting. Gone after something that might be worth this whole fucking war. Back later. That’s a little vague.”

“Accurate, though.”

“Is it?” He seated himself on the edge of the bed, chameleochrome coveralls shifting to match the quilt pattern. The recent scar tissue across forehead and cheek tugged as he frowned. “Is it a warship?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Deployable?”

I considered. “Dependent on the archaeologue support you’ve got to hand, I’d say yes, probably.”

“And how’s your current archaeologue support?”

I glanced across the open space of the bubblefab to where Tanya Wardani lay curled up under a sheet-thin insulating quilt. Like the rest of the Nagini gang survivors, she’d been lightly sedated. The medic who did it had said she was stable, but not likely to live much longer than me.

“Wasted.” I started coughing, couldn’t easily stop. Carrera waited it out. Handed me a wipe when I finished. I gestured weakly as I cleaned my mouth. “Just like the rest of us. How’s yours?”

“We have no archaeologue aboard currently, unless you count Sandor Mitchell.”

“I don’t. That’s a man with a hobby, not an archaeologue. How come you didn’t come Scratcher-equipped, Isaac?” Schneider must have told you what you were buying into. I weighed it up, split-second, and decided not to give up that particular piece of information yet. I didn’t know what value it held, if any, but when you’re down to your last harpoon clip, you don’t go firing at fins. “You must have had some idea what you were buying into here.”

He shook his head.

“Corporate backers, Takeshi. Tower-dweller scum. You get no more air from people like that than you absolutely need to get aboard. All I knew until today was that Hand was into something big, and if the Wedge brought back a piece of it, it’d be made worth our while.”

“Yeah, but they gave you the codes to the nanobe system. Something more valuable than that? On Sanction IV? Come on Isaac, you must have guessed what it was.”

He shrugged. “They named figures, that’s all. That’s how the Wedge works, you know that. Which reminds me. That’s Hand over by the door, right? The slim one.”

I nodded. Carrera wandered over and looked intently at the sleeping exec.

“Yeah. Missing some weight off the pix I’ve got on stack.” He paced the makeshift ward, glancing left and right at the other beds and the corpse in the corner. Through the meth rush and the weariness, I felt an old caution go itching along my nerves. “ ‘Course, that’s not surprising, the rad count around here. I’m surprised any of you are still up and walking around.”

“We’re not,” I pointed out.

“Right.” His smile was pained. “Jesus, Takeshi. Why didn’t you hold back a couple of days. Could have halved your dosage. I’ve got everybody on standard anti-rad, we’ll all walk out of here with no worse than headaches.”

“Not my call.”

“No, I don’t suppose it was. Who’s the inactive?”

“Sun Liping.” It hurt more to look at her than I’d expected. Wolf pack allegiances are a slippery thing, it seems. “Systems officer.”

He grunted. “The others?”

“Ameli Vongsavath, pilot officer.” I pointed them out with a cocked finger and thumb. “Tanya Wardani, archaeologue, Jiang Jianping, Luc Deprez, both stealth ops.”

“I see.” Carrera frowned again and nodded in Vongsavath’s direction. “So if that’s your pilot, who was flying the assault launch when she blew?”

“Guy called Schneider. He’s the one put me onto this whole gig in the first place. Fucking civilian pilot. He got rattled when the fireworks started out there. Took the ship, trashed Hansen, the guy we left on picket, with the ultravibe and then just blew hatches, left us to—”

“He went alone?”

“Yeah, unless you want to count the riders in the corpse locker. We lost two bodies to the nanobes before we went through. And we found another six on the other side. Oh, yeah and two more drowned in the trawler nets. Archaeologue team from back before the war, looks like.”

He wasn’t listening, just waiting until I stopped.

“Yvette Cruickshank, Markus Sutjiadi. Those were the members of your team the nanobe system took out?”

“Yeah.” I tried for mild surprise. “You got a crew list? Jesus, these tower-dwellers of yours cut some mean corporate security.”

He shook his head. “Not really. These tower-dwellers are from the same tower as your friend over there. Rivals for promotion, in fact. Like I said, scum.” There was a curious lack of venom in his voice as he said it, an absent tone that seemed to my Envoy antennae to carry with it a tinge of relief. “I don’t suppose you recovered stacks for any of the nanobe victims?”

“No, why?”

“Doesn’t matter. I didn’t really think you would. My clients tell me the system goes after any built components. Cannibalises them.”

“Yeah, that’s what we guessed too.” I spread my hands. “Isaac, even if we had recovered stacks, they’d have been vaporised with just about everything else aboard the Nagini.”

“Yes, it was a remarkably complete explosion. Know anything about that, Takeshi?”

I summoned a grin. “What do you think?”

“I think Lock Mit fast assault launches don’t vaporise in mid-air for no reason. And I think you seem less than outraged about this guy Schneider running out on you.”

“Well, he is dead.” Carrera folded his arms and looked at me. I sighed. “Yeah, OK. I mined the drives. I never trusted Schneider further than a clingfilm condom anyway.”

“With cause, it appears. And lucky for you we came along, given the results.” He got up, brushed his hands together. Something unpleasant definitely seemed to have slid off his screen. “You’d better get some rest, Takeshi. I’ll want a full debriefing tomorrow morning.”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Not much more to tell, anyway.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s not what my scanners say. We registered more energy discharged on the other side of that gate in the last seven hours than the sum generating cost of every hypercast to and from Sanction IV since it was settled. Myself, I’d say there’s a reasonable chunk of story left to tell.”

“Oh, that.” I gestured dismissively. “Well, you know, galactic ancients’ automated naval engagement. No big deal.”

“Right.”

He was on his way out when something seemed to strike him.

“Takeshi.”

I felt my senses tilt like mission time.

“Yeah?” Striving to stay casual.

“Just out of curiosity. How did you plan to get back? After you blew the assault launch? You know, with the nanobes operative, the background rad count. No transport, except maybe that piece-of-shit trawler. What were you going to do, walk out? You’re barely two steps ahead of inactive, all of you. What the hell kind of strategy was blowing your only available ride out?”

I tried to think back. The whole situation, the upward-sucking vertigo of the Martian ship’s empty corridors and chambers, the mummified gaze of the corpses and the battle with weapons of unimaginable power raging outside—all of it seemed to have receded an immense distance into the past. I suppose I could have yanked it all back in with Envoy focus, but there was something dark and cold in the way, advising against it. I shook my head.

“I don’t know, Isaac. I had suits stashed. Maybe swim out and hang around at the edge of the gate broadcasting a mayday squawk across to you guys.”

“And if the gate wasn’t radio-transparent?”

“It’s starlight-transparent. And scanner-transparent, apparently.”

“That doesn’t mean a coherent—”

“Then I’d have tossed through a fucking remote beacon and hoped it survived the nanobes long enough for you to get a fix. Jesus, Isaac. I’m an Envoy. We make this sniff up on the fly. Worse-case scenario, we had a close-to-working claim buoy. Sun could have fixed it, set it to transmit and then we could all have blasted our brains out and waited until someone came out to take a look. Wouldn’t have mattered much—none of us have got more than a week left in these sleeves anyway. And whoever came out to check the claim signal would have had to re-sleeve us—we’d be the resident experts, even if we were dead.”

He smiled at that. We both did.

“Still not what I’d call leaktight strategic planning, Takeshi.”

“Isaac, you just don’t get it.” A little seriousness dripped back into my voice, erasing my smile. “I’m an Envoy. The strategic plan was to kill anyone who tried to backstab me. Surviving afterwards, well that’s a bonus if you can do it, but if you can’t.” I shrugged. “I’m an Envoy.”

His own smile slipped slightly.

“Get some rest, Takeshi,” he said gently.

I watched him walk out, then settled to watching Sutjiadi’s motionless form. Hoping the tetrameth would keep me up until he came round and found out what he had to do to avoid formal execution at the hands of a Wedge punishment squad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Tetrameth is one of my favourite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like no, you can’t fly without a grav harness or punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side-effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.

The comedown is no worse than most poisons.

I was starting to feel slightly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail-end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi over-vigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.

“Jiang, hey Jiang. Open your fucking eyes. Guess where we are.”

He blinked up at me, face curiously child-like.

“Whuhh—”

“Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.” The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades-in-arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. “Fucking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.”

“The Wedge? That’s.” Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. “Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.”

I sat back again, on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.

“They came looking for me.” For all the pretense, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. “You believe that?”

“If you say so.” Sutjiadi propped himself up. “Who else made it out?”

“All of us except Sun.” I gestured. “And she’s retrievable.”

His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. “Back there. Did you. See?”

“Yeah, I saw.”

“They were ghosts,” he said, biting down on the words.

“Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.”

“That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.” Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. “Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?”

I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. “What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.”

She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.

“Good for you.” Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. “So who do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?”

“Take your pick.”

After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity—a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breath this stuff for a living.

Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage between us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.

“At least,” I said at one point, “We know why they left the fucking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near-miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.”

“I,” said Deprez emphatically, “Do not. Believe. In ghosts.”

“That didn’t seem to bother them.”

“Do you think,” Vongsavath, picking her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide, “all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?”

Wardani shook her head. “If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.”

“I felt,” Sutjiadi swallowed. “They were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilisation far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, any more. Maybe they evolved past that.”

I grunted. “Neat trick, if you can manage it.”

“And we apparently can’t,” said Wardani.

“Maybe we would have, if that kind of thing was left floating around every time we committed mass murder.”

“Kovacs, that’s absurd,” Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. “All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction IV? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.”

“Bravo, Hand.” Vongsavath clapped a handful of slow, sardonic applause. “You should have been a political officer. Just one problem with your muscular humanism there—that second ship wasn’t Martian. Right Mistress Wardani? Totally different config.”

All eyes fixed on the archaeologue, who sat with her head bowed. Finally, she looked up, met my gaze and nodded reluctantly.

“It did not look like any Martian technology I have ever seen or heard of.” She drew a deep breath. “On the evidence I saw. It would appear the Martians were at war with someone else.”

The unease rose from the floor again, winding among us like cold smoke, chilling the conversation to a halt. A tiny premonition of the wake-up call humanity was about to get.

We do not belong out here.

A few centuries we’ve been let out to play on these three dozen worlds the Martians left us but the playground has been empty of adults all that time, and with no supervision there’s just no telling who’s going to come creeping over the fence or what they’ll do to us. Light is fading from the afternoon sky, retreating across distant rooftops, and in the empty streets below it’s suddenly a cold and shadowy neighbourhood.

“This is nonsense,” said Hand. “The Martian domain went down in a colonial revolt, everyone agrees on that. Mistress Wardani, the Guild teaches that.”

“Yeah, Hand.” The scorn in Wardani’s voice was withering. “And why do you think they teach that? Who allocates Guild funding, you blinkered fuckwit? Who decides what our children will grow up believing?”

“There is evidence—”

“Don’t fucking talk to me about evidence.” The archaeologue’s wasted face lit with fury. For a moment I thought she was going to physically assault the executive. “You ignorant motherfucker. What do you know about the Guild? I do this for a living, Hand. Do you want me to tell you how much evidence has been suppressed because it didn’t suit the Protectorate worldview? How many researchers were branded antihuman and ruined, how many projects butchered, all because they wouldn’t ratify the official line? How much shit the appointed Guild Chancellors spurt every time the Protectorate sees fit to give them a funding handjob?”

Hand seemed taken aback by the sudden eruption of rage from this haggard, dying woman. He fumbled. “Statistically, the chances of two starfaring civilisations evolving so close to—”

But it was like walking into the teeth of a gale. Wardani had her own emotional ‘meth shot now. Her voice was a lash.

“Are you mentally defective? Or weren’t you paying attention when we opened the gate? That’s instant matter transmission across interplanetary distance, technology that they left lying around. You think a civilisation like that is going to be limited to a few hundred cubic light years of space? The weaponry we saw in action out there was faster than light. Those ships could both have come from the other side of the fucking galaxy. How would we know?”

The quality of light shifted as someone opened the bubblefab flap. Glancing away from Wardani’s face for a moment, I saw Tony Loemanako stood in the entrance to the bubblefab, wearing noncom-flashed chameleochrome and trying not to grin.

I raised a hand. “Hello, Tony. Welcome to the hallowed chambers of academic debate. Feel free to ask if you don’t follow any of the technical terms.”

Loemanako gave up trying to hide the grin. “I got a kid back on Latimer wants to be an archaeologue. Says he doesn’t want a profession of violence like his old man.”

“That’s just a stage, Tony. He’ll get over it.”

“Hope so.” Loemanako shifted stiffly, and I saw that under the chameleochrome coveralls, he wore a mobility suit. “Commander wants to see you right away.”

“Just me?”

“No, he said bring anyone who’s awake. I think it’s important.”

Outside the bubblefab, evening had closed the sky down to a luminous grey in the west and thickening darkness in the east. Under it all, Carrera’s camp was a model of ordered activity in the glow of tripod-mounted Angier lamps.

Envoy habit mapped it for me, cold detail floating over and above a tingling warm sense of hearthfire and company against the encroaching night.

Up by the gate, the sentries sat astride their bugs, leaning back and forth and gesturing. The wind carried down shreds of laughter I recognised as Kwok’s, but distance rendered the rest inaudible. Their faceplates were hinged up, but otherwise they were swim-prepped and still armed to the teeth. The other soldiers Loemanako had detailed to back them up stood around a mobile ultravibe cannon in similar casual alertness. Further down the beach, another knot of Wedge uniforms busied themselves with what looked like the components for a blast shield generator. Others moved back and forth from the Angin Chandra’s Virtue to the polalloy cabin and the other bubblefabs, carrying crates that could have been anything. Behind and above the scene, lights gleamed from the bridge of the ‘Chandra and at the loading level, where onboard cranes swung more equipment out of the battlewagon’s belly and down onto the lamplit sand.

“So how come the mob suit?” I asked Loemanako, as he led us down towards the unloading area.

He shrugged. “Cable batteries at Rayong. Our tinsel systems went down at a bad time. Got my left leg, hipbone, ribs. Some of the left arm.”

“Shit. You have all the luck, Tony.”

“Ah, it’s not so bad. Just taking a fuck of a long time to heal right. Doc says the cables were coated with some kind of carcinogenic, and it’s fucking up the rapid regrowth.” He grimaced. “Been like this for three weeks now. Real drag.”

“Well, thanks for coming out to us. Especially in that state.”

“No worries. Easier getting about in vac than here anyway. Once you’re wearing the mob suit, polalloy’s just another layer.”

“I guess.”

Carrera was waiting below the ‘Chandra’s loading hatch, dressed in the same field coveralls he’d worn earlier and talking to a small, similarly-attired group of ranking officers. A couple of noncoms were busy with mounted equipment up on the edge of the hatch. About halfway between the ‘Chandra and the blast shield detail, a ragged-looking individual in a stained uniform perched on a powered-down loadlifter, staring at us out of bleary eyes. When I stared back, he laughed and shook his head convulsively. One hand lifted to rub viciously at the back of his neck and his mouth gaped open as if someone had just drenched him with a bucket of cold water. His face twitched in tiny spasms that I recognised. Wirehead tremors.

Maybe he saw the grimace pass across my face.

“Oh, yeah, look that way,” he snarled. “You’re not so smart, not so fucking smart. Got you for antihumanism, got you all filed away, heard you all and your counter-Cartel sentiments, how do you like—”

“Shut up, Lamont.” There wasn’t much volume in Loemanako’s voice, but the wirehead jerked as if he’d just been jacked in. His eyes slipped around in their sockets alarmingly, and he cowered. At my side, Loemanako sneered.

“Political officer,” he said, and toed some sand in the shivering wreck of a human’s direction. “All the fucking same. All mouth.”

“You seem to have this one leashed.”

“Yeah, well.” Loemanako grinned. “You’d be amazed how quickly these political guys lose interest in their job once they’ve been socketed up and plugged in a few times. We haven’t had a Correct Thought lecture all month, and the personal files, well, I’ve read ‘em and our own mothers couldn’t have written nicer things about us. Amazing how all that political dogma just sort of fades away. Isn’t that right, Lamont?”

The political officer cringed away from Loemanako. Tears leaked into his eyes.

“Works better than the beatings used to,” said the noncom, looking at Lamont dispassionately. “You know, with Phibun and, what was that other shit-mouthed little turd called?”

“Portillo,” I said absently.

“Yeah, him. See you could never be sure if he was really beaten or if he’d come back at you when he’d licked his wounds a bit. We don’t have that problem any more. Think it’s the shame that does it. Once you’ve cut the socket and shown them how to hook up, they do it to themselves. And then, when you take it away… Works like magic. I’ve seen old Lamont here break his nails trying to get the interface cables out of a locked kitpack.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone,” said Tanya Wardani unevenly. “Can’t you see he’s already broken.”

Loemanako shot her a curious glance.

“Civilian?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Pretty much. She’s, uh, on secondment.”

“Well, that can work sometimes.”

Carrera seemed to have finished his briefing as we approached and the surrounding officers were beginning to disperse. He nodded acknowledgement at Loemanako.

“Thank you, sergeant. Did I see Lamont giving you some grief up there?”

The noncom grinned wolfishly. “Nothing he didn’t regret, sir. Think maybe it’s time he was deprived again, though.”

“I’ll give that some thought, sergeant.”

“Yes sir.”

“Meanwhile.” Carrera shifted his focus. “Lieutenant Kovacs, there are a few—”

“Just a moment, commander.” It was Hand’s voice, remarkably poised and polished, given the state he must be in.

Carrera paused.

“Yes?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of who I am, commander. As I am aware of the intrigues in Landfall that have led to your being here. You may not, however, be aware of the extent to which you have been deceived by those who sent you.”

Carrera met my gaze and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

“No, you’re mistaken,” said the Wedge commander politely. “I am quite well informed of the extent to which your Mandrake colleagues have been economical with the truth. To be honest, I expected no less.”

I heard the silence as Hand’s exec training stumbled. It was almost worth a grin.

“In any case,” Carrera went on, “The issue of objective truth doesn’t much concern me here. I have been paid.”

“Less than you could have been.” Hand rallied with admirable speed. “My business here is authorised at Cartel level.”

“Not any more. Your grubby little friends have sold you out, Hand.”

“Then that was their error, commander. There seems no reason for you to share in it. Believe me, I have no desire for retribution to fall where it is not deserved.”

Carrera smiled faintly. “Are you threatening me?”

“There is no need to view things in such—”

“I asked if you were threatening me,” The Wedge commander’s tone was mild. “I’d appreciate a straight yes or no.”

Hand sighed. “Let us just say that there are forces I may invoke which my colleagues have not considered, or at least not assessed correctly.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot, you are a believer.” Carrera seemed fascinated by the man in front of him. “A hougan. You believe that. Spiritual powers? Can be hired in much the same way as soldiers.”

Beside me, Loemanako sniggered.

Hand sighed again. “Commander, what I believe is that we are both civilised men and—”

The blaster tore through him.

Carrera must have set it for diffuse beam—you don’t usually get as much damage as that from the little ones and the thing in the Wedge commander’s hand was an ultra compact. A hint of bulk inside the closed fist, a fish-tailed snap-out projector between his second and third knuckle, spare heat, the Envoy in me noticed, still dissipating from the discharge end in visible waves.

No recoil, no visible flash, and no punch backwards where it hit. The crackle snarled past my ears and Hand stood there blinking with a smoking hole in his guts. Then he must have caught the stench of his own seared intestines and, looking down, he made a high-pitched hooting noise that was as much panic as pain.

The ultra compacts take a while to recharge, but I didn’t need peripheral vision to tell me jumping Carrera would be a mistake. Noncoms on the loading deck above, Loemanako beside me and the little knot of Wedge officers hadn’t dispersed at all—they’d just fanned out and given us room to walk into the set-up.

Neat. Very neat.

Hand staggered, still wailing, and sat down hard on his backside in the sand. Some brutal part of me wanted to laugh at him. His hands pawed the air close to the gaping wound.

I know that feeling, some other part of me recalled, surprised into brief compassion. It hurts, but you don’t know if you dare touch it.

“Mistaken again,” said Carrera to the ripped open exec at his feet. His tone hadn’t shifted since the shooting. “I am not a civilised man, Hand, I’m a soldier. A professional savage, and I’m on hire to men just like you. I wouldn’t like to say what that makes you. Except out of fashion back at the Mandrake Tower, that is.”

The noise Hand was making shaped towards a conventional scream. Carrera turned to look at me.

“Oh, you can relax Kovacs. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to do that before now.”

I manufactured a shrug. “Once or twice. I probably would have got around to it.”

“Well, now you don’t have to.”

On the ground, Hand twisted and propped himself. Something that might have been words emerged from his agony. At the edge of my vision, a couple of figures moved towards him: peripheral scan, still squeezed to aching point by the adrenalin surge, identified Sutjiadi and—well, well—Tanya Wardani.

Carrera waved them back.

“No, there’s no need for that.”

Hand was definitely speaking now, a ruptured hissing of syllables that weren’t any language I knew or, except once, had heard. His left hand was raised towards Carrera, fingers splayed. I crouched to his level, oddly moved by the contorted strength on his face.

“What’s this?” The Wedge commander leaned closer. “What’s he saying?”

I sat back on my heels. “I think you’re being cursed.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s not unreasonable under the circumstances. Still.” Carrera swung a long, heavy kick into the exec’s side. Hand’s incantation shredded apart in a scream and he rolled into a foetal ball. “No reason why we have to listen to it either. Sergeant.”

Loemanako stepped forward. “Sir.”

“Your knife please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Give Carrera credit—I’d never seen him ask any man in his command to carry out work he wouldn’t do himself. He took the vibroknife from Loemanako, activated it and kicked Hand again, stamping him onto his belly in the sand. The exec’s screams blurred into coughing and whooping sucked breath. Carrera knelt across his back and started cutting.

Hand’s muffled shrieking scaled abruptly up as he felt the blade enter his flesh, and then stopped dead as Carrera sliced his spinal column through.

“Better,” muttered the Wedge commander.

He made the second incision at the base of the skull, a lot more elegantly than I had back in the Landfall promoter’s office, and dug out the section of severed spine. Then he powered off the knife, wiped it carefully on Hand’s clothing and got up. He handed knife and spinal segment to Loemanako with a nod.

“Thank you, sergeant. Get that to Hammad, tell him not to lose it. We just earnt ourselves a bonus.”

“Yes, sir.” Loemanako looked at the faces around us. “And, uh…?”

“Oh, yes.” Carrera raised one hand. His face seemed suddenly tired. “That.”

His hand fell like something discarded.

From the loading deck above I heard the discharge, a muffled crump followed by a chitinous rustling. I looked up and saw what looked like a swarm of crippled nanocopters tumbling down through the air.

I made the intuitive leap to what was going to happen with a curious detachment, a lack of combat reflex that must have had its roots in the mingled radiation sickness and tetrameth comedown. I just had time to look at Sutjiadi. He caught my eye and his mouth twitched. He knew as well as I did. As well as if there’d been a scarlet decal pulsing across the screen of our vision.

Game—

Then it was raining spiders.

Not really, but it looked that way. They’d fired the crowd control mortar almost straight up, a low-power crimped load for limited dispersal. The grey fist-sized inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty metres. The ones at the nearest edge glanced off the curving side of the battlewagon’s hull before they hit the sand, skidding and flailing for purchase with a minute intensity that I later recalled almost with amusement. The others bedded directly in puffs of turquoise sand and scuttled up out of the tiny craters they’d made like the tiny jewelled crabs in Tanya Wardani’s tropical paradise virtuality.

They fell in thousands.

Game—

They dropped on our heads and shoulders, soft as children’s cradle toys, and clung.

They scuttled towards us across the sand and scrambled up our legs.

They endured batting and shaking and clambered on undeterred.

The ones Sutjiadi and the others tore loose and flung away landed in a whirl of limbs and scuttled back unharmed.

They crouched knowledgeably above nerve points and plunged filament-thin tendril fangs through clothing and skin.

Game—

They bit in.

—Over.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

There was no less reason for adrenalin to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shrivelled my sleeve’s capacity to deliver combat chemicals. The inhibitors reacted accordingly. I felt the nerve snap go through me, but it was a mild numbness, a fizzing that only dropped me to one knee.

The Maori sleeves were readier for a fight and so they took it harder. Deprez and Sutjiadi staggered and crashed into the sand as if shot with stunners. Vongsavath managed to control her fall, and rolled to the ground on her side, eyes wide.

Tanya Wardani just stood there looking dazed.

“Thank you gentlemen.” It was Carrera, calling up to the noncoms manning the mortar. “Exemplary grouping.”

Neural inhib remotes. State-of-the-art public order tech. Only cleared colonial embargo a couple of years ago. In my capacity as a local military adviser, I’d had the shiny new system demonstrated to me on crowds in Indigo City. I’d just never been on the receiving end before now.

Chill, an enthusiastic young public order corporal had told me with a grin. That’s all you need to do. ‘Course, that’s extra funny in a riot situation. This shit lands on you, you’re just going to get more ‘dreened up, means they just go on biting you, maybe even stop your heart in the end. Have to be fucking Zen-rigged to break the spiral, and you know what, we’re short on Zen riot activists this season.

I held the Envoy calm like a crystal, wiped my mind of consequence and got up. The spiders clung and flexed a little as I moved, but they didn’t bite again.

“Shit, lieutenant, you’re coated. They must like you.”

Loemanako stood grinning at me from within a circle of clear sand, while surplus inhibitor units crawled around on the outer edge of the field his clean tag must be throwing down. A little to his right, Carrera moved in a similar pool of immunity. I glanced around and saw the other Wedge officers, untouched and watching.

Neat. Very fucking neat.

Behind them, political officer Lamont capered and pointed at us, jabbering.

Oh well. Who could blame him.

“Yes, I think we’d better get you brushed off,” said Carrera. “I’m sorry for the shock, Lieutenant Kovacs, but there was no other comfortable way to detain this criminal.”

He was pointing at Sutjiadi.

Actually, Carrera, you could have just sedated everybody in the ward ‘fab. But that wouldn’t have been dramatic enough, and where transgressors against the Wedge are concerned, the men do like their stylised drama, don’t they?

I felt a brief chill run along my spine, chasing the thought.

And tamped it down quick, before it could become the fear or anger that would wake up the coat of spiders I wore.

I went for weary-laconic.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Isaac?”

“This man,” Carrera’s voice was pitched to carry. “May have misrepresented himself to you as Jiang Jianping. His real name is Markus Sutjiadi, and he is wanted for crimes against Wedge personnel.”

“Yeah.” Loemanako lost his grin. “Fucker wasted Lieutenant Veutin, and his platoon sergeant.”

“Veutin?” I looked back at Carrera. “Thought he was down around Bootkinaree.”

“Yes, he was.” The Wedge commander was staring down at Sutjiadi’s crumpled form. For a moment I thought he was going to shoot him there and then with the blaster. “Until this piece of shit cut insubordinate and finished up feeding Veutin his own Sunjet. Killed Veutin really dead. Stack gone. Sergeant Bradwell went the same way when she tried to stop it. And two more of my men got their sleeves carved apart before someone locked this motherfucker down.”

“No one gets away with that,” said Loemanako sombrely. “Right, lieutenant? No local yokel takes down Wedge personnel and walks away from it. Shithead’s for the anatomiser.”

“Is this true?” I asked Carrera, for appearances’ sake.

He met my gaze and nodded. “Eye-witnesses. It’s open and shut.”

Sutjiadi stirred at his feet like something stamped on.

They cleaned the spiders off me with a deactivator broom, and then dumped them into a storage canister. Carrera handed me a tag and the approaching tide of unoccupied inhibitors fell back as I snapped it on.

“About that debriefing,” he said, and gestured me aboard the ‘Chandra.

Behind me, my colleagues were led back to the bubblefab, stumbling as feeble adrenalin jags of resistance set off new ripples of bites from their new neural jailers. In the post-performance space we’d all left, the noncoms who’d fired the mortar went around with untamped canisters, gathering up the still crawling units that hadn’t managed to find a home.

Sutjiadi caught my eye again as he was leaving. Imperceptibly, he shook his head.

He needn’t have worried. I was barely up to climbing the entry ramp into the battlewagon’s belly, let alone taking on Carrera in empty-handed combat. I clung to the remaining fragments of the tetrameth lift and followed the Wedge commander along tight, equipment-racked corridors, up a hand rung-lined gravchute and into the confines of what appeared to be his personal quarters.

“Sit down, lieutenant. If you can find the space.”

The cabin was cramped but meticulously tidy. A powered-down grav bed rested on the floor in one corner, under a desk that hinged out from the bulkhead. The work surface held a compact datacoil, a neat stack of bookchips and a pot-bellied statue that looked like Hun Home art. A second table occupied the other end of the narrow space, studded with projector gear. Two holos floated near the ceiling at angles that allowed viewing from the bed. One showed a spectacular image of Adoracion from high orbit, sunrise just breaking across the green and orange rim. The other was a family group, Carrera and a handsome olive-skinned woman, arms possessively encompassing the shoulders of three variously aged children. The Wedge commander looked happy, but the sleeve in the holo was older than the one he was wearing now.

I found a spartan metal desk chair beside the projector table. Carrera watched me sit down and then leaned against the desk, arms folded.

“Been home recently?” I asked, nodding at the orbital holo.

His gaze stayed on my face. “It’s been a while. Kovacs, you knew damn well that Sutjiadi was wanted by the Wedge, didn’t you.”

“I still don’t know he is Sutjiadi. Hand sold him to me as Jiang. What makes you so sure?”

He almost smiled. “Nice try. My tower-dweller friends gave me gene codes for the combat sleeves. That plus the sleeving data from the Mandrake stack. They were quite keen for me to know that Hand had a war criminal working for him. Added incentive, I imagine they saw it as. Grist to the deal.”

“War criminal.” I looked elaborately around the cabin. “That’s an interesting choice of terminology. For someone who oversaw the Decatur Pacification, I mean.”

“Sutjiadi murdered one of my officers. An officer he was supposed to be taking orders from. Under any combat convention I know of, that’s a crime.”

“An officer? Veutin?” I couldn’t quite work out why I was arguing, unless it was out of a general sense of inertia. “Come on, would you take orders from Dog Veutin?”

“Happily, I don’t have to. But his platoon did, and they were fanatically loyal, all of them. Veutin was a good soldier.”

“They called him Dog for a reason, Isaac.”

“We are not engaged in a pop—”

“—ularity contest.” I sketched a smile of my own. “That line’s getting a little old. Veutin was a fucking asshole, and you know it. If this Sutjiadi torched him, he probably had a good reason.”

“Reasons do not make you right, Lieutenant Kovacs.” There was a sudden softness in Carrera’s tone that said I’d overstepped the line. “Every graft-wrapped pimp on Plaza de los Caidos has a reason for every whore’s face they carve up, but that doesn’t make it right. Joshua Kemp has reasons for what he does and from his point of view they might even be good ones. That doesn’t make him right.”

“You want to watch what you’re saying, Isaac. That sort of relativism could get you arrested.”

“I doubt it. You’ve seen Lamont.”

“Yeah.”

Silence ebbed and flowed around us.

“So,” I said finally. “You’re going to put Sutjiadi under the anatomiser.”

“Do I have a choice?”

I just looked at him.

“We are the Wedge, lieutenant. You know what that means.” There was the slightest tug of urgency in his tone now. I don’t know who he was trying to convince. “You were sworn in, just like everyone else. You know the codes. We stand for unity in the face of chaos, and everyone has to know that. Those we deal with have to know that we are not to be fucked with. We need that fear, if we’re going to operate effectively. And my soldiers have to know that that fear is an absolute. That it will be enforced. Without that, we fall apart.”

I closed my eyes. “Whatever.”

“I’m not requiring you to watch it.”

“I doubt there’ll be enough seats.”

Behind my closed eyelids, I heard him move. When I looked, he was leaning over me, hands braced on the edges of the projector table, face harsh with anger.

“You’re going to shut up now, Kovacs. You’re going to stand down that attitude.” If he was looking for resistance, he couldn’t have seen any in my face. He backed off a half metre, straightened up. “I won’t let you piss away your commission like this. You’re a capable officer, lieutenant. You inspire loyalty in the men you lead, and you understand combat.”

“Thanks.”

“You can laugh, but I know you. It’s a fact.”

“It’s the biotech, Isaac. Wolf gene pack dynamics, serotonin shutout and Envoy psychosis to pilot the whole fucking shambles. A dog could do what I’ve done for the Wedge. Dog fucking Veutin, for example.”

“Yes.” A shrug as he settled himself on the edge of the desk again. “You and Veutin are, were, very similar in profile. I have the psychosurgeon assessments on file here, if you don’t believe me. Same Kemmerich gradient, same IQ, same lack of generalisable empathy range. To the untutored eye, you could be the same man.”

“Yeah, except he’s dead. Even to the untutored eye, that’s got to stand out.”

“Well, maybe not quite the same lack of empathy, then. The Envoys gave you enough diplomatic training not to underestimate men like Sutjiadi. You would have handled him better.”

“So Sutjiadi’s crime was he got underestimated? Seems as good a reason as any to torture a man to death, I suppose.”

He stopped and stared at me. “Lieutenant Kovacs, I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Sutjiadi’s execution is not under discussion here. He murdered my soldiers, and at dawn tomorrow I will exact the penalty for that crime. I may not like it—”

“How gratifyingly humane of you.”

He ignored me. “—but it needs to be done, and I will do it. And you, if you know what’s good for you, will ratify it.”

“Or else?” It wasn’t as defiant as I’d have liked, and I spoilt it at the end with a coughing fit that racked me over in the narrow chair and brought up blood-streaked phlegm. Carrera handed me a wipe.

“You were saying?”

“I said, if I won’t ratify the ghoul show, what happens to me?”

“Then I’ll inform the men that you knowingly attempted to protect Sutjiadi from Wedge justice.”

I looked around for somewhere to toss the soiled wipe. “Is that an accusation?”

“Under the table. No, there. Next to your leg. Kovacs, it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. I think you probably did, but I don’t really care one way or the other. I have to have order, and justice must be seen to be done. Fit in with that, and you can have your rank back, plus a new command. If you step out of line, you’ll be next on the slab.”

“Loemanako and Kwok won’t like that.”

“No, they won’t. But they are Wedge soldiers, and they will do as they are told for the good of the Wedge.”

“So much for inspiring loyalty.”

“Loyalty is a currency like any other. What you have earned, you can spend. And shielding a known murderer of Wedge personnel is more than you can afford. More than any of us can afford.” He leaned off the desk edge. Beneath the coveralls, Envoy scan read his stance at endgame. It was the way he always stood in the final round of sparring sessions that had gone down to the wire. The way I’d seen him stand when the government troops broke around us at Shalai Gap and Kemp’s airborne infantry swept down out of the storm-front sky like hail. There was no fallback from here. “I do not want to lose you, Kovacs, and I do not want to distress the soldiers who have followed you. But in the end, the Wedge is more than any one man within it. We cannot afford internal dissent.”

Outnumbered and outgunned and left for dead at Shalai, Carrera held position in the bombed-out streets and buildings for two hours, until the storm swept in and covered everything. Then he led a stalk-and-slaughter counteroffensive through the howling wind and street-level shreds of cloud until the airwaves crackled stiff with panicked airborne commanders ordering withdrawal. When the storm lifted, Shalai Gap was littered with the Kempist dead and the Wedge had taken less than two dozen casualties.

He leaned close again, no longer angry. His eyes searched my face.

“Am I—finally—making myself clear, lieutenant? A sacrifice is required. We may not like it, you and I, but that is the price of Wedge membership.”

I nodded.

“Then you are ready to move past this?”

“I’m dying, Isaac. About all I’m ready for right now is some sleep.”

“I understand. I won’t keep you much longer. Now.” He gestured through the datacoil and it awoke in swirls. I sighed and groped after fresh focus. “The penetration squad took an extrapolated line back from the Nagini’s angle of re-entry and fetched up pretty damn close to the same docking bay you breached. Loemanako says there were no apparent shut-out controls. So how did you get in?”

“Was already open.” I couldn’t be bothered to construct lies, guessed in any case that he’d interrogate the others soon enough. “For all we know, there are no shut-out controls.”

“On a warship?” His eyes narrowed. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Isaac, the whole ship mounts a spatial shield that stands at least two kilometres out from the hull. What the fuck would they need with individual docking station shut out?”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah. Very much in action.”

“Hmm.” He made a couple of minor adjustments in the coil. “The sniffer units found human traces a good three or four kilometres into the interior. But they found you in an observation bubble not much more than a kilometre and a half from your entry point.”

“Well, that couldn’t have been hard. We painted the way with big fucking illuminum arrows.”

He gave me a hard look. “Did you go walkabout in there?”

“Not me, no.” I shook my head, then regretted it as the little cabin pulsed unpleasantly in and out of focus around me. I waited it out. “Some of them did. I never found out how far they went.”

“Doesn’t sound very organised.”

“It wasn’t,” I said irritably. “I don’t know, Isaac. Try and incubate a sense of wonder, huh? Might help when you get over there.”

“So it, ah, appears.” He hesitated, and it took me a moment to realise he was embarrassed. “You, ah, you saw. Ghosts. Over there?”

I shrugged, suppressing an urge to cackle uncontrollably. “We saw something. I’m still not sure what it was. Been listening in to your guests, Isaac?”

He smiled and made an apologetic gesture. “Lamont’s habits, rubbing off on me. And since he’s lost the taste for snooping, seems a shame to let the equipment go to waste.” He prodded again at the datacoil. “The medical report says you all showed symptoms of a heavy stunblast, except you and Sun, obviously.”

“Yeah, Sun shot herself. We…” Abruptly, it seemed impossible to explain. Like trying to shoulder a massive weight unaided. The last moments in the Martian starship, wrapped in the brilliant pain and radiance of whatever her crew had left behind them. The certainty that this alien grief was going to crack us open. How did you convey that to the man who had led you behind raging gunfire to victory at Shalai Gap and a dozen other engagements? How did you get across the ice-aching diamond-bright reality of those moments?

Reality? The doubt jolted rudely.

Was it? Come to that, come to the gun barrel-and-grime reality that Isaac Carrera lived, was it real any more? Had it ever been? How much of what I remembered was hard fact?

No, look. I’ve got Envoy recall—

But had it been that bad? I looked into the datacoil, trying wearily to muster rational thought. Hand had called it, and I bought in with something not much short of panic. Hand, the hougan. Hand, the religious maniac. When else had I ever trusted him as far as I could throw him?

Why had I trusted him then?

Sun. I grabbed at the fact. Sun knew. She saw it coming and she blew her own brains out rather than face it.

Carrera was looking at me strangely.

“Yes?”

You and Sun…

“Wait a minute.” It dawned on me. “You said except Sun and me?”

“Yes. The others all show the standard electroneural trauma. Heavy blast, as I said.”

“But not me.”

“Well, no.” He looked puzzled. “You weren’t touched. Why, do you remember someone shooting you?”

When we were done, he flattened the datacoil display with one callused hand and walked me back through the empty corridors of the battlewagon and then across the night-time murmur of the camp. We didn’t talk much. He’d backed up in the face of my confusion, and let the debriefing slide. Probably he couldn’t believe he was seeing one of his pet Envoys in this state.

I was having a hard time believing it myself.

She shot you. You dropped the stunner and she shot you, then herself. She must have.

Otherwise…

I shivered.

On a clear patch of sand to the rear of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, they were erecting the scaffold for Sutjiadi’s execution. The primary support struts were already in place, sunk deep into the sand and poised to receive the tilted, runnelled butcher’s platform. Under the illumination from three Angier lamps and the environ floods from the battlewagon’s rear drop hatch, the structure was a claw of bleached bone rising from the beach. The disassembled segments of the anatomiser lay close by, like sections of a wasp someone had chopped to death.

“The war’s shifting,” said Carrera conversationally. “Kemp’s a spent force on this continent. We haven’t had an air strike in weeks. He’s using the iceberg fleet to evacuate his forces across the Wacharin straits.”

“Can’t he hold the coast there?” I asked the question on automatic, the ghost of attention from a hundred deployment briefings past.

Carrera shook his head. “Not a chance. That’s a flood plain a hundred klicks back south and east. Nowhere to dig in, and he doesn’t have the hardware to build wet bunkers. That means no long-term jamming, no net-supported weapon systems. Give me six more months and I’ll have amphibious armour harrying him off the whole coastal strip. Another year and we’ll be parking the ‘Chandra over Indigo City.”

“And then what?”

“Sorry?”

“And then what? When you’ve taken Indigo City, when Kemp’s bombed and mined and particle-blasted every worthwhile asset there is and escaped into the mountains with the real diehards, then what?”

“Well.” Carrera puffed out his cheeks. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “The usual. Holding strategy across both continents, limited police actions and scapegoating until everyone calms down. But by that time…”

“By that time we’ll be gone, right?” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Off this fucking mudball and somewhere where they know a losing game when they see one. Give me that much good news at least.”

He looked across at me and winked. “Hun Home’s looking good. Internal power struggle, lots of palace intrigue. Just your speed.”

“Thanks.”

At the bubblefab flap, low voices filtered out into the night air. Carrera cocked his head and listened.

“Come in and join the party,” I said morosely, pushing through ahead of him. “Save you going back to Lamont’s toys.”

The three remaining members of the Mandrake expedition were gathered in seats around a low table at the end of the ward. Carrera’s security had broomed off the bulk of the inhib units and left each prisoner at detention-standard, a single inhibitor squatting like a tumour at the nape of the neck. It made everyone look peculiarly hunched, as if caught in mid-conspiracy.

They looked round as we entered the ward, reacting across a spectrum. Deprez was the least expressive; barely a muscle moved in his face. Vongsavath caught my eye and raised her brows. Wardani looked past me to where Carrera stood and spat on the quick-wipe floor.

“That’s for me, I assume,” said the Wedge commander easily.

“Share it,” suggested the archaeologue. “You seem close enough.”

Carrera smiled. “I’d advise against cranking up your hate too far, Mistress Wardani. Your little friend back there is apt to bite.”

She shook her head, wordless. One hand rose in reflex, halfway to the inhib unit, then dropped away. Maybe she’d already tried removing it. It’s not a mistake you make twice.

Carrera walked to the splatter of saliva, bent and scooped it up with one finger. He examined it closely, brought it to his nose and grimaced.

“You don’t have long, Mistress Wardani. In your place I think I’d be a little more civil to the person who’s going to advise on whether you’re re-sleeved or not.”

“I doubt that’ll be your decision.”

“Well.” The Wedge commander wiped his finger on the nearest bedsheet, “I did say ‘advise’. But then, this presupposes that you make it back to Landfall in some re-sleevable capacity. Which you might not.”

Wardani turned to me, blocking Carrera off in the process. A subtle snub that made the diplomatic strand in my conditioning want to applaud.

“Is your catamite here threatening me?”

I shook my head. “Making a point, I think.”

“Too subtle for me.” She cast a disdainful glance back at the Wedge commander. “Perhaps you’d better just shoot me in the stomach. That seems to work well. Your preferred method of civilian pacification, presumably.”

“Ah, yes. Hand.” Carrera hooked a chair from the collection around the table. He turned it back forward and straddled it. “Was he a friend of yours?”

Wardani looked at him.

“I didn’t think so. Not your sort at all.”

“That has nothing to—”

“Did you know he was responsible for the bombing of Sauberville?”

Another wordless pause. This time the archaeologue’s face sagged with shock, and suddenly I saw how very far the radiation had eaten into her.

Carrera saw it too.

“Yes, Mistress Wardani. Someone had to clear a path for your little quest, and Matthias Hand arranged for it to be our mutual friend Joshua Kemp. Oh, nothing direct of course. Military misinformation, carefully modelled and then equally carefully leaked along the right data channels. But enough to convince our resident revolutionary hero in Indigo City that Sauberville would look better as a grease stain. And that thirty-seven of my men didn’t need their eyes any more.” He flipped a glance at me. “You must have guessed, right?”

I shrugged. “Seemed likely. A little too convenient otherwise.”

Wardani’s eyes snapped sideways to mine, disbelieving.

“You see, Mistress Wardani.” Carrera got up as if his whole body ached. “I’m sure you’d like to believe I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’m just a man doing a job. Men like Matthias Hand create the wars I make my living fighting. Keep that in mind next time you feel the need to insult me.”

The archaeologue said nothing, but I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face. Carrera turned to go, then stopped.

“Oh, and Mistress Wardani, one more thing. Catamite.” He looked at the floor, as if pondering the word. “I have what many would consider a rather limited range of sexual preferences, and anal penetration doesn’t feature among them. But I see from your camp records that the same cannot be said for you.”

She made a noise. Behind it, I almost heard the creak and shift of the recovery scaffolding Envoy artifice had built inside her. The sound of damage done. I found myself, inexplicably, on my feet.

“Isaac, you—”

“You?” He was grinning like a skull as he faced me. “You, you pup. Had better sit down.”

It was nearly a command, nearly froze me in my tracks. Envoy bile rose sneering and beat it aside.

“Kovacs—” Wardani’s voice, like a cable snapping.

I met Carrera halfway, one crooked hand rising for his throat, a muddled kick emerging from the rest of my sickness-tangled stance. The big Wedge body swayed in to meet me and he blocked both attacks with brutal ease. The kick slipped away left, taking me off balance and he locked out my striking arm at the elbow, then smashed it.

It made a crunching noise in the back of my head, an empty whisky tumbler crushed underfoot in some dimly lit bar. The agony swarmed my brain, wrenched out a single short scream and then subsided under neurachem pain management. Wedge combat custom—seemed the sleeve was still good for that much. Carrera had not released his hold, and I dangled from the grip he had on my forearm like a powered-down child’s doll. I flexed my undamaged arm experimentally, and he laughed. Then he twisted hard on the shattered elbow joint, so pain rose back up like a black cloud behind my eyes, and dropped me. A casual kick to the stomach left me foetal, and not interested in anything much above ankle height.

“I’ll send the medics,” I heard him say somewhere above me. “And Mistress Wardani, I suggest you shut your mouth, or I will have some of my less sensitive men come and fill it for you. That and maybe give you a forcible reminder of what the word catamite means. Don’t test me, woman.”

There was a rustle of clothing, and then he crouched at my side. One hand gripped my jaw and turned my face upward.

“You’re going to have to get that sentimental shit out of your system if you want to work for me, Kovacs. Oh, and just in case you don’t.” He held up a curled up inhib spider in his hand. “Temporary measure, purely. Just until we’re done with Sutjiadi. We’ll all feel a lot safer this way.”

He tipped his opened palm sideways, and the inhib unit rolled off into space. To my endorphin-dulled senses, it seemed to take a long time. I got to watch with something approaching fascination as the spider unrolled its legs in mid-air and fell nailing to the floor less than a metre from my head. There it gathered itself, spun about once or twice and then scuttled towards me. It clambered up over my face, then down around to my spine. A tiny spike of ice reached down into the bone, and I felt the cable-like limbs tighten around the back of my neck.

Oh well.

“Be seeing you, Kovacs. Have a think about it.” Carrera got up and apparently left. For a while, I lay there checking the seals on the cosy blanket of numbness my sleeve’s systems had wrapped me in. Then there were hands on my body, helping me into a sitting position I had no real interest in attaining.

“Kovacs.” It was Deprez, peering into my face. “You OK, man?”

I coughed weakly. “Yeah, great.”

He propped me against the edge of the table. Wardani moved into view above and behind him. “Kovacs?”

“Uhhhhhh, sorry about that, Tanya.” I risked a searching glance at the level of control on her face. “Should have warned you not to push him. He’s not like Hand. He won’t take that shit.”

“Kovacs.” There were muscles twitching her face that might have been the first crumbling of the jerry-built recovery edifice. Or not. “What are they going to do to Sutjiadi?”

A little pool of quiet welled up in the wake of the question.

“Ritual execution,” said Vongsavath. “Right?”

I nodded.

“What does that mean?” There was an unnerving calm in Wardani’s voice. I thought I might rewrite my assumptions about her state of recovery. “Ritual execution. What are they going to do?”

I closed my eyes, summoned images from the last two years. The recollection seemed to bring a dull seeping ache up from my shattered elbow joint. When I’d had enough, I looked at her face again.

“It’s like an autosurgeon,” I said slowly. “Reprogrammed. It scans the body, maps the nervous system. Measures resilience. Then, they run a rendering programme.”

Wardani’s eyes widened a little. “Rendering?”

“It takes him apart. Flays the skin, flenses the flesh, cracks the bones.” I drew on memory. “Disembowels him, cooks his eyes in their sockets, shatters his teeth and probes the nerves.”

She made a half-formed gesture against the words she was hearing.

“It keeps him alive while it does it. If he looks like going into shock, it stops. Gives him stimulants if necessary. Gives him whatever’s necessary, apart from painkillers, obviously.”

Now it felt as if there was a fifth presence among us, crouched at my side, grinning and squeezing the shards of broken bone in my arm. I sat in my own biotech-damped pain, remembering what had happened to Sutjiadi’s predecessors while the Wedge gathered to watch like the faithful at some arcane altar to the war.

“How long does this last?” asked Deprez

“It depends. Most of the day.” The words dragged out of me. “It has to be over by nightfall. Part of the ritual. If no one stops it earlier, the machine sections and removes the skull at last light. That usually does it.” I wanted to stop talking, but it seemed no one else wanted to stop me, “Officers and noncoms have the option to call a coup de grâce vote from the ranks, but you won’t get that until late afternoon, even from the ones that want it over. They can’t afford to come across softer than the rank and file. And even late, even then, I’ve seen the vote go against them.”

“Sutjiadi killed a Wedge platoon commander,” said Vongsavath. “I think there will be no mercy vote.”

“He’s weak,” Wardani said hopefully. “With the radiation poisoning—”

“No.” I flexed my right arm and a spike of pain ran up to my shoulder, even under the neurachem. “The Maori sleeves are contam combat-designed. Very high endurance.”

“But the neurache—”

I shook my head “Forget it. The machine will adjust for that, kill the pain management systems first, rip them out.”

“Then he’ll die.”

“No, he won’t,” I shouted. “It doesn’t work that way.”

No one said much after that.

A pair of medics arrived, one the man who had treated me earlier, the second a hard-faced woman I didn’t know. They checked my arm with elaborately non-committal competence. The presence of the inhib unit crouched on my nape and what it said about my status both went carefully unremarked. They used an ultravibe microset to break up the bone fragments around the shattered elbow joint, then set regrowth bios in deep, long monofilament feed lines topped off at skin level with the green marker tags and the chip that told my bone cells what to do and, more to the point, how fucking rapidly to get it done. No slacking here. Never mind what you did back in the natural world, you’re part of a military custom operation now, soldier.

“Couple of days,” said the one I knew, peeling a rapid-dump endorphin dermal off the crook of my arm. “We’ve cleared up the ragged edges, so flexing it shouldn’t do any serious damage to the surrounding tissue. But it will hurt like fuck, and it slows down the healing process so try to avoid it. I’ll grip-pad you so you remember.”

A couple of days. In a couple of days, I’d be lucky if this sleeve was still breathing. Recollection of the doctor aboard the orbital hospital flashed through my head. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The absurdity of it bubbled through me and escaped as a sudden, unlooked-for grin.

“Hey, thanks. Don’t want to slow down the healing process, do we?”

He smiled back weakly, then hurriedly turned his gaze to what he was doing. The grip-pad went on tight from bicep to lower forearm, warm and comforting, and constricting.

“You part of the anatomiser crew?” I asked him.

He gave me a haunted look. “No. That’s scan-related, I don’t do it.”

“We’re done here, Martin,” said the woman abruptly. “Time to go.”

“Yeah.” But he moved slowly, unwillingly as he folded up the battlefield kitpack. I watched the contents disappearing, taped-over surgical tools and the strips of brightly coloured dermals in their tug-down sleeves

“Hey, Martin.” I nodded at the pack. “You going to leave me a few of those pinks. I was planning to sleep late, you know.”

“Uh—”

The female medic cleared her throat. “Martin, we aren’t—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, will you.” He turned on her with fury boiling up out of nowhere. Envoy instinct kicked me in the head. Behind his back, I reached for the pack. “You don’t rank me, Zeyneb. I’ll dispense what I fucking like and you—”

“ ‘S OK,” I said quietly. “I got them anyway.”

Both medics fixed on me. I held up the trailing strip of endorphin dermals I’d grabbed free in my left hand. I smiled thinly.

“Don’t worry, I won’t take them all at once.”

“Maybe you should,” said the female medic. “Sir.”

“Zeyneb, I told you to shut up.” Martin gathered up the kitpack in a hurry, tightening it in his arms, cradling it. “You, uh, they’re fast-acting. No more than three at any one time. That will keep you under, whatever you h—” He swallowed. “Whatever is going on around you.”

“Thanks.”

They gathered the rest of their equipment and left. Zeyneb looked back at me from the bubblefab flap and her mouth twisted. Her voice was too low for me to catch what she said. Martin raised his arm in a cuffing gesture, and they both ducked out. I watched them go, then looked down at the strip of dermals in my clenched fist.

“That’s your solution?” asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. “Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

She turned away.

“Then get down off that fucking prayer tower and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.”

“We could—”

“We could what? We’re inhibited, we’re most of us a couple of days off death from catastrophic cell damage, and I don’t know about you, but my arm hurts. Oh, yeah, and this whole place is wired for sight and sound to the political officer’s cabin, which, I imagine, Carrera has ready access to when he wants it.” I felt a slight twinge from the thing on the nape of my neck, and realised my own anger was getting the better of my weariness. I locked it down. “I’ve done all the fighting I’m going to do, Tanya. Tomorrow we get to spend the day listening to Sutjiadi die. You deal with that any way you want. Me, I’m going to sleep through it.”

There was a searing satisfaction in throwing the words out at her, like twisting shrapnel out of a wound in your own flesh. But somewhere underneath it, I kept seeing the camp commandant, shut down in his chair, current running, the pupil of his remaining human eye bumping idly against the upper lid.

If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again. I heard the words again, whispering out of him like dying breath. So I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.

I wondered what kind of discomfort I’d need at this stage of the game. What kind of chair I’d need to be strapped into.

Somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

And I wondered why the hand at the end of my injured arm was not empty.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Sutjiadi started screaming shortly after it got light.

Outraged fury for the first few seconds, almost reassuring in its humanity, but it didn’t last. In less than a minute, every human element boiled away to the white bone of animal agony. In that form it came searing up the beach from the butcher’s slab, shriek after peeling shriek filling the air like something solid, hunting listeners. We had been waiting for it since before the dawn but it still hit like a shockwave, a visible flinch through each of us where we sat hunched on beds no one had even tried to sleep in. It came for us all, and touched us with a sickening intimacy. It laid clammy hands over my face and a clamped grip on my ribcage, stopping breath, spiked the hairs on my neck and sent a single twitch through one eye. At my nape, the inhib unit tasted my nervous system and stirred interestedly.

Lock it down.

Behind the shrieking ran another sound I knew. The low growl of an aroused audience. The Wedge, seeing justice done.

Cross-legged on the bed, I opened my fists. The dermal strips fell to the quilt.

Something flickered.

I saw the dead visage of the Martian, printed across my vision so clear it might have been a retinal display.

this chair—

—wakes me.

—spinning motes of shadow and light—

—dirge of alien grief—

I could feel—

—a Martian visage, in amongst the swirl of brilliant pain, not dead—

—great unhuman eyes that met mine with something that—

I shuddered away from it.

The human scream ran on, ripping along nerves, digging into marrow. Wardani buried her face in her hands.

I shouldn’t be feeling this bad, a detached part of me argued. This isn’t the first time I’ve—

Unhuman eyes. Unhuman screams.

Vongsavath began to weep.

I felt it rising in me, gathering in spirals the way the Martians had done. The inhib unit tensed.

No, not yet.

Envoy control, cold and methodical unpicking of human response just when I needed it. I welcomed it like a lover on Wardani’s sunset beach—I think I was grinning as it came on.

Outside on the slab, Sutjiadi screamed pleading denial, the words wrenched out of him like something drawn with pliers.

I reached down to the grip-pad on my arm and tugged it slowly towards my wrist. Twinges ran through the bone beneath as the movement snagged the regrowth biotags.

Sutjiadi screamed, ragged glass over tendon and gristle in my head. The inhibitor—

Cold. Cold.

The grip-pad reached my wrist and dangled loose. I reached for the first of the biotags.

Someone might be watching this from Lamont’s cabin, but I doubted it. Too much else on the menu right now. And besides, who watches detainees with inhibitor systems crouched on their spines? What’s the point? Trust the machine and get on with something more rewarding.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I gripped the tag and applied evenly mounting pressure.

You’re not doing this, I reminded myself. You’re just sitting here listening to a man die, and you’ve done enough of that in the past couple of years for it not to bother you. No big deal. The Envoy systems, fooling every adrenal gland in my body and plastering me with a layer of cool detachment. I believed what I told myself at a level deeper than thought. On my neck, the inhibitor twitched and snugged itself down again.

A tiny tearing and the regrowth bio filament came out.

Too short.

Fu—

Cold.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I selected another tag and tugged it gently side to side. Beneath the surface of the skin, I felt the monofilament slice tissue down to the bone in a direct line and knew it was also too short.

I looked up and caught Deprez looking at me. His lips framed a question. I gave him a distracted little smile and tried another tag.

Sutjiadi screamed.

The fourth tag was the one—I felt it slicing flesh in a long curve through and around my elbow. The single endorphin dermal I’d shot earlier kept the pain to a minor inconvenience, but the tension still ran through me like wires. I took a fresh grip on the Envoy lie that absolutely nothing was happening here, and pulled hard.

The filament came up like a kelp cable out of damp beach sand, ripping a furrow through the flesh of my forearm. Blood spritzed my face.

Sutjiadi screamed. Searing, sawing up and down a scale of despair and disbelief at what the machine was doing to him, at what he could feel happening to the sinewed fibres of his body.

“Kovacs what the fuck are you—” Wardani shut up as I cut her a look and jabbed a finger at my neck. I wrapped the filament carefully around my left palm, knotted it behind the tag. Then, not giving myself time to think about it, I splayed my hand and drew the noose smoothly and rapidly tight.

Nothing is happening here.

The monofilament sliced into my palm, went down through the pad of tissue as if through water and came up against the interface bioplate. Vague pain. Blood welled from the invisible cut in a thin line, then blotched across the whole palm. I heard Wardani’s breath draw short, and then she yelped as her inhibitor bit.

Not here my nerves told the inhib unit on my own neck. Nothing happening here.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I unknotted the filament and drew it clear, then flexed my damaged palm. The lips of the wound across the palm split and gaped. I stuffed thumb into the split and—

NOTHING is happening here. Nothing at all.

—twisted until the flesh tore.

It hurt, endorphin or no fucking endorphin, but I had what I wanted. Below the mangled mass of meat and fatty tissue, the interface plate showed a clear white surface, beaded with blood and finely scarred with biotech circuitry. I worked the lips of the wound further apart until there was a clear patch of plate exposed. Then I reached back with no more conscious intent than you’d get from a back-cracking yawn, and jammed the gashed hand onto the inhibitor.

And closed my fist.

For just a moment, I thought my luck had run out. Luck that had seen me through removing the monofilament without major vascular damage, that had let me get to the interface plate without severing any useful tendons. Luck that had no one watching Lamont’s screens. Luck like that had to run dry at some point and as the inhib unit shifted under my blood-slippery grip I felt the whole teetering structure of Envoy control start to come down.

Fuck

The interface plate—user locked, hostile to any uncoded circuitry in direct contact—bucked in my ripped palm and something shorted out behind my head.

The inhibitor died with a short electronic squeal.

I grunted, then let the pain come up through gritted teeth as I reached back with my damaged arm and began to unflex the thing’s grip on my neck. Reaction was setting in now, a muted trembling racing up my limbs and a spreading numbness in my wounds.

“Vongsavath,” I said as I worked the inhibitor loose. “I want you to go out there, find Tony Loemanako.”

“Who?”

“The noncom who came to collect us last night.” There was no longer any need to suppress emotion, but I found the Envoy systems were doing it anyway. Even while Sutjiadi’s colossal agony scraped and raked along my nerve endings, I seemed to have discovered an inhuman depth of patience to balance against it. “His name is Loemanako. You’ll probably find him down by the execution slab. Tell him I need to talk to him. No, wait. Better just tell him I said I need him. Those words exactly. No reasons, just that. I need him right now. That should bring him.”

Vongsavath looked to the closed flap of the bubblefab. It barely muffled Sutjiadi’s uncontrolled shrieking.

“Out there,” she said.

“Yes. I’m sorry.” I finally got the inhib unit off. “I’d go myself, but it’d be harder to sell, that way. And you’re still wearing one of these.”

I examined the carapace of the inhibitor. There was no outward sign of the damage the interface plate’s counterintrusion systems had done, but the unit was inert, tentacles spasmed stiff and clawed.

The pilot officer got up unsteadily. “Alright. I’m going.”

“And Vongsavath.”

“Yeah?”

“Take it easy out there.” I held up the murdered inhibitor. “Try not to get excited about anything.”

It appeared I was smiling again. Vongsavath stared at me for a moment, then fled. Sutjiadi’s screams blistered through in her wake for a moment, and then the flap fell back again.

I turned my attention to the drugs in front of me.

Loemanako came at speed. He ducked through the flap ahead of Vongsavath—another momentary lift in Sutjiadi’s agony—and strode down the centre aisle of the bubblefab to where I lay curled up on the end bed, shivering.

“Sorry about the noise,” he said, leaning over me. One hand touched my shoulder gently. “Lieutenant, are you—”

I struck upward, into the exposed throat.

Five rapid-dump dermals of tetrameth from the strip my right hand had stolen the previous night, laid directly across major blood vessels. If I’d been wearing an unconditioned sleeve, I’d be cramped up and dying now. If I’d had less conditioning of my own, I’d be cramped up and dying now.

I hadn’t dared dose myself with less.

The blow ripped open Loemanako’s windpipe, and tore it across. Blood gushed, warm over the back of my hand. He staggered backwards, face working, eyes child-like with disbelieving hurt. I came off the bed after him—

—something in the wolf splice weeps in me at the betrayal—

—and finished it.

He toppled and lay still.

I stood over the corpse, thrumming inside with the pulse of the tetrameth. My feet shifted unsteadily under me. Muscle tremors skipped down one side of my face.

Outside, Sutjiadi’s screams modulated upward into something new and worse.

“Get the mobility suit off him,” I said harshly.

No response. I glanced around and realised I was talking to myself. Deprez and Wardani were both slumped against their beds, stunned. Vongsavath was struggling to rise, but could not coordinate her limbs. Too much excitement—the inhibitors had tasted it in their blood and bitten accordingly.

“Fuck.”

I moved between them, clenching my mutilated hand around the spider units and tearing them loose as they spasmed. Against the shift and slide of the tetrameth, it was almost impossible to be more gentle. Deprez and Wardani both grunted with shock as their inhibitors died. Vongsavath’s went harder, sparking sharply and scorching my opened palm. The pilot vomited bile, and thrashed. I knelt beside her and got fingers into her throat, pinning her tongue until the spasm passed.

“You o—”

Sutjiadi shrieked across it.

“—kay?”

She nodded weakly.

“Then help me get this mob suit off. We don’t have a lot of time ‘til he’s missed.”

Loemanako was armed with an interface pistol of his own, a standard blaster and the vibroknife he’d loaned to Carrera the night before. I cut his clothes off and went to work on the mob suit beneath. It was combat spec—it powered down and peeled at battlefield speed. Fifteen seconds and Vongsavath’s shaky assistance were enough to shut off the dorsal and limb drives and unzip the frame. Loemanako’s corpse lay throat open, limbs spread, outlined in an array of upward-jutting flex-alloy fibre spines that reminded me fleetingly of bottleback corpses butchered and half-filleted for barbecue meat on Hirata beach.

“Help me roll him out of—”

Behind me, someone retched. I glanced back and saw Deprez propping himself upright. He blinked a couple of times and managed to focus on me.

“Kovacs. Did you—” His gaze fell on Loemanako. “That’s good. Now, do you want to share your plans for a change?”

I gave Loemanako’s corpse a final shove and rolled it clear of the unwrapped mob suit. “Plan’s simple, Luc. I’m going to kill Sutjiadi and everyone else out there. While that’s going on, I need you to get inside the ‘Chandra and check for crew or conscientious objectors to the entertainment. Probably be a few of each. Here, take this.” I kicked the blaster across to him. “Think you’ll need anything else?”

He shook his head muzzily. “You spare the knife? And drugs. Where are those fucking tetrameth.”

“My bed. Under the quilt.” I lay on the suit without bothering to undress and began to pull the support struts closed across my chest and stomach. Not ideal, but I didn’t have the time. Ought to be OK—Loemanako was bigger framed than my sleeve, and the servoamp uptake pads are supposed to work through clothing at a push. “We’ll go together—I figure it’s worth the risk of a run to the polalloy shed before we start.”

“I’m coming,” said Vongsavath grimly.

“No, you’re fucking not.” I closed the last of the body struts and started on the arms. “I need you in one piece; you’re the only person can fly the battlewagon. Don’t argue, it’s the only way any of us get out of here. Your job is to stay here and stay alive. Get the legs.”

Sutjiadi’s screams had damped down to semi-conscious moans. I felt a scribble of alarm run up my spine. If the machine saw fit to back off and leave its victim to recover for any length of time, those in the back rows of the audience might start to drift away for an interval cigarette. I hit the drives while Vongsavath was still fastening the last of the ankle joint struts and felt more than heard the servos murmur to life. I flexed my arms—jag of unwatched pain in the broken elbow, twinges in the ruined hand—and felt the power.

Hospital mob suits are designed and programmed to approximate normal human strength and motion while cushioning areas of trauma and ensuring that no part of the body is strained beyond its convalescent limits. In most cases the parameters are hardwired in to stop stupid little fucks from overriding what’s good for them.

Military custom doesn’t work like that.

I tensed my body and the suit got me to my feet. I thought a kick to groin height and the suit lashed out with speed and strength to dent steel. A left-handed back fist long strike. The suit put it there like neurachem. I crouched and flexed, and knew the servos would put me five metres into the air on demand. I reached out with machined precision and picked up Loemanako’s interface gun right handed. Digits scrambled along the display as it recognised the Wedge codes in my undamaged palm. Red gleam of the load light, and I knew through the prickling in my palm what the magazine carried. The vacuum commando’s standby. Jacketed slugs, short-fused plasma core. Demolition load.

Outside, the machine somehow kicked Sutjiadi back up into screaming. Hoarse now, his voice was shredding. A deeper groundswell rose behind the shrieks. Audience cheers.

“Get the knife,” I told Deprez.

CHAPTER FORTY

Outside, it was a beautiful day.

The sun was warm on my skin and glinting off the hull of the battlewagon. There was a slight breeze coming in off the sea, scuffing whitecaps. Sutjiadi screamed his agony at a careless blue sky.

Glancing down to the shoreline, I saw they’d erected metal-framed banks of seats around the anatomiser. Only the top of the machine showed above the heads of the spectators. Neurachem reeled in a tighter view—a sense of heads and shoulders tensed in fascination at what was happening on the slab, and then suddenly a glimpse of something flapping, membrane-thin and blood-streaked, torn loose from Sutjiadi’s body by pincers and caught by the breeze. A fresh shriek floated up in its wake. I turned away.

You patched and evacuated Jimmy de Soto while he screamed and tried to claw out his own eyes. You can do this.

Functionality!

“Polalloy shed,” I muttered to Deprez and we moved down the beach to the far end of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, as rapidly as seemed safe without tripping some Wedge veteran’s combat-amped peripheral vision. There’s an art to it they teach you in covert ops—breath shallow, move smoothly. Minimise anything that might trigger the enemy’s proximity senses. Half a minute of itching exposure was all it took, and then we were shielded from the seat banks by the swell of the ‘Chandra’s hull.

On the far side of the shed, we came across a young Wedge uniform, braced on the structure and vomiting his guts up in the sand. He looked up out of a sweat-beaded face as we rounded the corner, features twisted in misery.

Deprez killed him with the knife.

I kicked open the door with mob suit strength and swung inside, eyes flexed out to total scan in the sudden gloom.

Lockers stood tidily against one wall. A corner table held an assortment of helmet frames. Wall racks offered boot bases and breathing apparatus. The hatch to the showers was open. A Wedge noncom looked round from a datacoil at another desk, face haggard and angry.

“I’ve already fucking told Artola I’m not—” She spotted the mob suit and peered, getting up. “Loemanako? What are you—”

The knife skipped through the air like a dark bird off my shoulder. It buried itself in the noncom’s neck, just above the collar bone and she jerked in shock, came a wavering step towards me, still peering, and then collapsed.

Deprez stepped past me, knelt to check his handiwork and then withdrew the knife. There was a clean economy of motion in his movements that belied the state of his radiation-blasted cells.

He stood up and caught me looking at him.

“Something?”

I nodded at the corpse he’d just made. “Not bad for a dying man, Luc.”

He shrugged. “Tetrameth. Maori sleeve. I have been worse equipped.”

I dumped the interface gun on the table, picked up a pair of helmet frames and tossed one to him. “You done this before?”

“No. I’m not a spaceman.”

“OK. Put this on. Hold the struts, don’t smudge the faceplate.” I gathered boot bases and breathing sets at tetrameth speed. “The air intake fits through here, like this. The pack straps over your chest.”

“We don’t nee—”

“I know, but it’s quicker this way. And it means you can keep the faceplate down. Might save your life. Now stamp down on the boot bases, they’ll stick in place. I’ve got to power this thing up.”

The shower systems were set into the wall next to the hatch. I got one unit running, then nodded at Deprez to follow me, and went through into the shower section. The hatch cycled closed behind us, and I caught the thick solvent odour of the polalloy pouring in the confined space. The operational unit’s lamps flashed orange in the low light surroundings, glinting off the dozens of twisting threads of polalloy where they ran down from the shower heads and spread like oil on the angled floor of the cubicle.

I stepped in.

It’s an eerie feeling the first time you do it, like being buried alive in mud. The polalloy lands on you in a thin coating that quickly builds to a sliding sludge. It masses on the dome of cross-netting at the top of the helmet frame, then topples and pours down around your head, stinging your throat and nostrils even through your locked breathing. Molecular repulsion keeps it off the surface of the faceplate, but the rest of the helmet is sheathed in twenty seconds. The rest of your body, right down to the boot bases, takes about half as long again. You try to keep it away from open wounds or raw flesh; it stings before it dries.

fffffffuuuuck

It’s airtight, watertight, utterly sealed, and it’ll stop a high-velocity slug like battlewagon armour. At a distance, it even reflects Sunjet fire.

I stepped down and felt through the polalloy for the breathing set controls. Thumbed the vent control. Air hissed under my jaw, filling the suit and popping it loose around my body. I killed the air and chinned the faceplate control. The plate hinged silently up.

“Now you. Don’t forget to hold your breath.”

Somewhere outside, Sutjiadi was still screaming. The tetrameth scratched at me. I almost yanked Deprez out of the shower, punched the air supply and watched as his suit popped.

“OK, that’s it.” I dialled down to intake standard. “Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit’s malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern.”

The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

“Try to stay alive, Luc.”

I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night—five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok’s hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she’d never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn’t identify.

Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

They spotted me at twenty metres—I wasn’t hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.

“Lieutenant?”

I shot her first. A single shot, in through the opened faceplate. The detonating plasma core blew the helmet apart as I ran forward.

—aching throatful of wolf loyalty, rubbed raw—

The second suit was moving when I got to him, a single leap in the mob suit and a mid-air kick that slammed him back against the carapace of the bug. He bounced off, one hand reaching to slap his faceplate closed. I grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired down into his yelling mouth.

Something hammered me in the chest, threw me on my back in the sand. I saw an unsuited figure stalking towards me, hand gun flung out. The interface gun dragged my arm up a handsbreadth and I shot his legs out from under him. Finally, a scream to compete with Sutjiadi, and time running out. I chinned my faceplate closed and flexed my legs. The mob suit threw me to my feet again. A Sunjet blast lashed the sand where I had been. I tracked round and snapped off a shot. The Sunjet wielder spun about with the impact and red glinting fragments of spine exploded out of his back as the shell detonated.

The last one tried to close with me, blocking my gun arm upward and stamping down at my knee. Against an unarmoured man, it was a good move, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The edge of his foot bounced off the mob suit and he staggered. I twisted and snapped out a roundhouse kick with all the balanced force the suit would give me.

It broke his back.

Something banged off the front of the bug. I looked down the beach and saw figures spilling from the makeshift amphitheatre, weapons levelling. I snapped a shot off in reflex, then got a grip on my ‘meth-scrambled thought processes and straddled the bug.

The systems awoke at a slap to the ignition pad—lights and dataflow in the hooded and heavily armoured instrument panels. I powered up, lifted a quarter-turn about to face the advancing Wedge, selected weaponry and—

—howl, howl, HOWL—

some kind of snarling grin made it to my face as the launchers cut loose.

Explosives aren’t good for much in vacuum combat. No shockwave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.

The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub shells into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-sized razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.

It was the weapon that ripped 391 platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok’s eyes, Eddie Munharto’s limbs, and my shoulder.

Two months? Why does it feel like another lifetime?

The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turned from men and women into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those further off just died in sudden pieces.

The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air, and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field.

There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.

I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.

Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.

“What—” he pleaded.

The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some hell I hadn’t heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half levelled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the shoreline beside Sutjiadi’s impromptu funeral pyre, and picked out motion at the water’s edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured—he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug’s screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.

“Who?” he kept saying. “Who?”

He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.

“Lieutenant Kovacs?” His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. “Who did this?”

“We did,” I told him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.

I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.

Movement from the ‘Chandra.

I whipped about on the bug and saw a polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry rank and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug’s screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit’s gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was massive.

The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.

“Carrera,” he managed hoarsely. “Forward hatch.”

I was already moving, already knowing bone-deep I was too late.

The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three metres from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.

Fuck you, Isaac, fuck you for a diehard motherfucker.

I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. The locker room was as I’d left it. The female noncom’s corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.

I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.

Fuck.

Well, it figures. I shut down the shower system absently. What did you expect, that he’d be easy to kill?

I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.

Deprez died while I was gone.

When I got back to him, he’d given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood—at close range, a Sunjet cauterises totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had got him point blank.

Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were knelt in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in passing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.

“Tanya.”

She heard it in my voice. “What now?”

“It’s a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?”

“Right.” She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. “There’s a shutdown procedure that doesn’t require encoding, yes. How did you know?”

I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn’t usually work this way. “Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterwards.”

Her voice lowered. “Yes.”

“This shutdown. How long will it take?”

“I, fuck, Kovacs. I don’t know. A couple of hours. Why?”

“Carrera isn’t dead.”

She coughed up a fractured laugh. “What?”

“You see that big fucking hole in Luc.” The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. “Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy and is by now on the other side of the fucking gate. That clear enough for you?”

“Then why don’t you leave him there?”

“Because if I do,” I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the ‘meth surge. “If I do, he’ll swim up while you’re trying to close the gate and he’ll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead. Very shortly.”

“Then why don’t we just get the fuck out of here right now?” asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the Angin Chandra’s Virtue. “In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. Fuck it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months.”

I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.

“No. We have to close the gate.”

Vongsavath threw up her hands. “What the fuck for? Who care—”

“Stow it, Ameli.” I flexed the suit upright again. “Tell the truth, I don’t think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I’m afraid we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.

I wasn’t sure if that was the ‘meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whisky on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn’t seem to matter that much.

Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.

“You going on the bug?” she asked. “Or do you want an impeller frame?”

“We’ll need both.”

“Yeah?” she looked suddenly interested. “How come? Do you want me—”

“The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty kiloton yield. I’m going to fire that motherfucker across and see if we can’t fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won’t. He’ll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I’ll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that,” I shrugged. “It’s a fair fight.”

“And I suppose I’m not—”

“Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?”

“Around here?” she looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. “It feels out of place.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

You can’t do this,” said Wardani quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre of the gate-space, and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

“Tanya, we’ve seen this thing withstand weapons that…” I searched for adequate words. “That I for one don’t understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you. Look at you.”

I looked down at controls on the firing board. “I’m good for a couple more days.”

“Yeah—in a hospital bed. Do you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you’re in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.”

“Rubbish. You’re forgetting the tetrameth.”

“Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?”

“Long enough.” I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. “What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?”

“Kovacs.” She waited until I looked at her. “Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I’ll get the gate closed.”

“Tanya, why didn’t you shoot me with the stunner?”

Silence.

“Tanya?”

“Alright,” she said violently. “Piss your fucking life away out there. See if I care.”

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

“I,” she dropped her gaze. “I panicked.”

“That, Tanya, is bullshit. I’ve seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn’t been any of them. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

“Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?”

“Well enough.”

She snorted. “Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge people?”

“People like Schneider, you mean?” I shrugged. “He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don’t you. He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.”

“Oh, you’re feeling proud of yourself, is that it?” She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up towards us. “Think you’ve achieved something here, do you?”

“You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?”

“No!”

“It’s not a problem, Tanya.” I shrugged again. “The only thing I can’t work out is why I didn’t die. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I, I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.”

“Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn’t. That, and why I woke up so fast.”

“Maybe,” she said, not looking at me, “You don’t have whatever is inside the rest of us.”

“Hoy, Kovacs.”

We both shifted to look down the beach again.

“Kovacs. Look what I found.”

It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.

“I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Who is it?”

I rustled up a dry chuckle. “Survivor type. Look.”

Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we’d met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognised me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of metres away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.

“Knew it!” He cackled out loud. “Knew you’d do it. Got files on you, I knew you would. I heard you. Heard you, but I didn’t say.”

“Found him in the armoury crawlspace,” said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. “Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.”

“Heard you, saw you,” said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. “Got files on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs. Knew you’d do it.”

“Did you,” I said sombrely.

“Heard you, saw you, but I didn’t say.”

“Yeah, well that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It’s in the directives.” I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five metres behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.

“Knew you’d do it,” he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.

“Did you get the impeller?” I asked Vongsavath.

I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren’t shielded and I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.

Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes—it wouldn’t permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.

Then why are you sitting here, Tak?

Suit’ll soak it up.

But it was a little more than that. Sat astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn’t that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.

Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the ‘meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to—

Or maybe you’re just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the Mivtsemdi all over again.

Shall we just get on with it?

The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow enough to be visible, breached the gate-space with a faint sucking sound and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn’t think it worth mentioning.

Nice to be right, huh?

Not that it matters much now anyway.

I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and ploughed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.

“Two hours, you said, Tanya.”

She ignored me. She hadn’t spoken since I shot Lamont.

“Well.” I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. “Whatever you’ve got to do, start doing it now.”

“What if you’re not back in time?” objected Vongsavath.

I grinned. “Don’t be stupid. If I can’t waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I’m not coming back. You know that.”

Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.

Through the gate. Look—easy as falling.

My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.

Here we fucking go again.

Carrera made his play.

Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems nickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defences the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinselled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.

By then, I was too busy to watch.

I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.

Not yet.

The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn’t have one of those to hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug’s drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera’s next move.

Come on you motherfucker.

Ah-ah. You’re expecting, Tak.

We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

Thanks, Virginia.

Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn’t have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn’t suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.

I hadn’t had time to find and install the Wedge’s battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn’t either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako’s team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched—there wouldn’t be much.

You hope.

The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favour. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.

There.

Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.

I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera’s missile homing in on the bug.

I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward towards the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn’t see me, and by the time he could…

Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.

Not yet. Not—

Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometre now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he’d have to deal with, and while he was doing that I’d get close.

I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.

Space erupted in light around me.

For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.

Flare. You stupid fuck, he’s lit you up.

I snapped on the impellers and whirled away sideways. Sunjet fire chased me from a rampart on the hull over my head. On one spin, I managed to get off returning fire. Three sputtering seconds, but Carrera’s beam shut off. I fled for the roof, got some piece of hull architecture between me and Carrera’s position, then reversed the impeller drive and braked to slow drift. Blood hammered in my temples.

Did I get him?

Proximity to the hull forced receding of my surroundings. The alien sculpted architecture of the vessel overhead was suddenly the surface of a planetoid and I was head down five metres over it. The flare burnt steadily a hundred metres out, casting twisted shadows past the chunk of hull architecture I was floating behind. Weird detail scarred the surfaces around me, curls and scrapings of structure like scrawlings in has relief, glyphs on a monumental scale.

Did I—

“Nice evasion, Kovacs.” Carrera’s voice spoke into my ear as if he was sitting in the helmet beside me. “Not bad for a non-swimmer.”

I checked the head up displays. The suit radio was set for receive only. I nudged sideways in the helmet space and the transmit symbol glowed on. A cautious body flex put me parallel to the hull. Meanwhile…

Keep him talking.

“Who told you I was a non-swimmer?”

“Oh, yes, I was forgetting. That fiasco with Randall. But a couple of outings like that hardly make you a VacCom veteran.” He was playing for avuncular amusement, but there wasn’t much hiding the raw ugliness of the rage underneath it. “Which fact explains why it’s going to be very easy for me to kill you. That is what I’m going to do, Kovacs. I’m going to smash in your faceplate and watch your face boil out.”

“Better get on with it, then.” I scanned the solidified bubbling of hull in front of me, looking for a sniper vantage point. “Because I don’t plan to be here much longer.”

“Only came back for the view, huh. Or did you leave some holoporn with sentimental value lying around the docking bay?”

“Just keeping you out of the way while Wardani closes the gate, that’s all.”

A short pause, in which I could hear him breathing. I shortened the tether line on the Sunjet until it floated close beside my right arm, then touched the trim controls on the impeller arm and risked a half-second impulse. The straps tugged as the racked motors on my back lifted me delicately up and forward.

“What’s the matter, Isaac? You sulking?”

He made a noise in his throat. “You’re a piece of shit, Kovacs. You’ve sold out your comrades like a tower dweller. Murdered them for credit.”

“I thought that’s what we were about, Isaac. Murder for credit.”

“Don’t give me your fucking Quellisms, Kovacs. Not with a hundred Wedge personnel dead and blown apart back there. Not with the blood of Tony Loemanako and Kwok Yuen Yee on your hands. You are the murderer. They were soldiers.”

A tiny stinging in my throat and eyes at the names.

Lock it down.

“They slaughtered sort of easily for soldiers.”

“Fuck you, Kovacs.”

“Whatever.” I reached out for the approaching curve of the hull architecture where a small bubble formed a rounded spur on one side of the main structure. Behind my outstretched arms, the rest of my body shifted into a dead stop posture. A momentary sense of panic sweated through me at the sudden thought that the hull might be contact-mined in some way—

Oh well. Can’t think of everything.

—and then my gloved hands came to rest on the curving surface and I stopped moving. The Sunjet bumped gently off my shoulder. I risked a rapid glance through the gull-winged space where the two bubble forms intersected. Ducked back. Envoy recall built me a picture and mapped it against memory.

It was the docking bay, centred at the bottom of the same three-hundred-metre dimple and set about with bubbled hillocks that were themselves distorted by other smaller swellings rising haphazardly from their flanks. Loemanako’s squad must have left a locater beacon, because there was no other way Carrera could have found the place this fast on a hull nearly thirty klicks across and sixty long. I looked at the suit receiver display again, but the only channel showing was the one Carrera’s slightly hoarse breathing came through on. No big surprise; he would have killed the broadcast as soon as he got set up. No point in telegraphing his ambush point to anyone else.

So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.

I eased myself painstakingly back to a viewing position and started scanning the globular landscape below me a degree at a time. All I needed was a single careless move. Just one.

From Isaac Carrera, decorated VacCom commander, survivor of half a thousand vacuum combat engagements and victor in most. A careless move. Sure, Tak. Coming right up.

“You know, I wonder, Kovacs.” His voice was calm again. He’d cranked his anger back under control. Under the circumstances, the last thing I needed. “What kind of deal did Hand offer you?”

Scan, search. Keep him talking.

“More than you’re paying me, Isaac.”

“I think you’re forgetting our rather excellent healthcare cover.”

“Nope. Just trying to avoid needing it again.”

Scan, search.

“Was it so bad, fighting for the Wedge? You were guaranteed re-sleeving at all times, and it’s not as if a man of your training was ever likely to suffer real death.”

“Three of my team would have to disagree with you, there, Isaac. If they weren’t already really fucking dead, that is.”

A slight hesitation. “Your team?”

I grimaced. “Jiang Jianping got turned into soup by an ultravibe blast, the nanobes took Hansen and Cruicksha—”

“Your tea—”

“I heard what you fucking said the first time, Isaac.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I merely wonder—”

“Training’s got fucking nothing to do with it, and you know it. You can go sell that fucking song to Lapinee. Machines and luck, that’s what kills you or keeps you alive on Sanction IV.”

Scan, search, find that motherfucker.

And calm down.

“Sanction IV and any other conflict,” Carrera said quietly. “You of all people should know that. It’s the nature of the game. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have dealt yourself in. The Wedge isn’t a conscript army.”

“Isaac, the whole fucking planet has been conscripted into this war. No one’s got any choice any more. You’re going to be involved, you might as well have the big guns. That’s a Quellism for you, in case you wondered.”

He grunted. “Sounds like common sense to me. Didn’t that bitch ever say anything original.”

There. My ‘methed-out nerves jumped with it. Right there.

The slim edge of something built by human technology, stark angular outline caught by flarelight among the curves at the base of a bubble outcrop. One side of an impeller set frame. I settled the Sunjet into place and lined up on the target. Drawled response.

“She wasn’t a philosopher, Isaac. She was a soldier.”

“She was a terrorist.”

“We quibble over terms.”

I triggered the Sunjet. Fire lanced across the concave arena and splashed off the outline. Something exploded visibly off the hull, in fragments. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.

Breathing.

It was the only thing that warned me. The papery whisper of breath at the bottom of the suit receiver. The suppressed sound of effort.

Fu—

Something invisible shattered and shed light over my head. Something no more visible spanged off my faceplate, leaving a tiny glowing V of chipped glass. I felt other tiny impacts off my suit.

Grenade!

Instinct had me already spinning to the right. Later, I realised why. It was the quickest route between Carrera’s position and mine, working round the rim of hull architecture that ringed the docking bay. A single third of the circle, and Carrera had crept round it while he talked to me. Shed of the impellers that had decoyed me and would in any case telltale his movement, he’d dragged and shoved himself from handhold to boot purchase point, all the way round. He’d used anger to disguise the stress in his voice as he worked, held down his breathing elsewhere, and at some point he judged close enough, he’d lain still and waited for me to give myself away with the Sunjet. And with the experience of decades in vacuum combat, he’d hit me with the one weapon that wouldn’t show up.

Exemplary, really.

He came at me across fifty metres of space like a flying version of Semetaire on the beach, arms reaching. The Sunjet sprouted recognisably from his right fist, a Philips squeeze launcher from his left. Though there was no way to detect it, I knew the second electromag-accelerated grenade was already in flight between us.

I jammed the impellers to life and backflipped. The hull vanished from view, then hinged back in from the top as I spiralled away. The grenade, deflected by the wash from the impeller drives as I flipped, exploded and sewed space with shrapnel. I felt shards of the stuff bang through one leg and foot, sudden numbing impacts and then traceries of pain through the flesh like biofilaments slicing. My ears popped painfully as suit pressure dropped. The polalloy socked inward at a dozen other points, but it held.

I tumbled up and over the bubble outcrop, a sprawling target in the flarelight, hull and bearings spinning around me. The pain in my ears eased as the polalloy congealed across the damage. No time to look for Carrera. I trimmed the impeller thrust, then dived once more for the globular landscape stretching below me. Sunjet fire flashed around me.

I hit the hull a glancing blow, used the impact to change trajectories and saw another Sunjet blast scythe past on the left. I caught a glimpse of Carrera as he adhered briefly to a rounded surface back up the slope of the dimple. I already knew the next move. From there, he’d push off with a single well-controlled kick and ride the simple linear velocity down towards me, firing as he came. At some point he’d get close enough to punch molten holes through the suit that the polalloy could not congeal over.

I bounced off another bubble. More idiot tumbling. More near-miss Sunjet fire. I trimmed the impellers again, tried for a line that would take me into the shadow of the outcrop, and cut off the thrust. My hands groped after something to hold and caught on one of the bas relief scroll effects I’d spotted earlier. I killed my motion and twisted round to look for Carrera.

No sign. I was out of line of sight.

I turned back and crept gratefully further around the bubble outcrop. Another curl of bas relief offered itself and I reached down—

Oh, shit.

I was holding the wing of a Martian.

Shock held me unstirring for a second. Time enough for me to think this was some kind of carving in the hull surface, time enough to know at some deep level that it wasn’t.

The Martian had died screaming. The wings were flung back, sunk into the hull surface for most of their width, protruding only at the curled extremities and where their muscled webbing rose up under the arched spine of the creature. The head was twisted in agony, beak gaping open, eyes glaring like comet-tailed orbs of washed jet. One clawed limb lifted talons above the hull surface. The whole corpse was sheathed in the material of the hull it had flailed against, drowning there.

I shifted my gaze and looked out across the surface ahead of me, the scattered scrawl of raised detail, and knew finally what I was looking at. The hull around the docking-bay dimple—all of it, the whole bubbling expanse—was a mass grave, a spider’s web trap for thousands upon thousands of Martians who had all died entombed in whatever substances had run and foamed and burst here when—

When what?

The shape of the catastrophe was outside anything I could envisage. I could not imagine the weapons that would do this, the circumstances of this conflict between two civilisations as far ahead of humanity’s scavenger-built little empire as we were from the gulls whose bodies had clogged the water around Sauberville. I could not see how it could happen. I could only see the results. I could only see the dead.

Nothing ever changes. A hundred and fifty light years from home and the same shit just keeps going down.

Got to be some kind of universal fucking constant.

The grenade bounced off another hull-drowned Martian ten metres away, careened up and exploded. I rolled away from the blast. A brief pummelling over my back and one searing penetration under my shoulder. Pressure drop like a knife through my eardrums. I screamed.

Fuck this.

I fired the impellers and burst out of the cover of the bubble outcrop, not knowing what I was going to do until I did it. Carrera’s gliding figure showed up less than fifty metres off. I saw Sunjet fire, turned on my back and dived directly at the docking-bay mouth. Carrera’s voice trailed me, almost amused.

“Where do you think you’re going, Kovacs?”

Something exploded at my back and the impeller thrust cut out. Scorching heat across my back. Carrera and his fucking VacCom skills. But with the residual velocity, and well, maybe a little spirit realm luck cadged off the vengeful ghost of Hand—he shot you after all, Matt, you did curse the fucker—just to grease the palm of whatever fate…

I ploughed through the atmosphere baffles of the docking bay at a slewed angle, found gravity beneath me and battered into one of the stacked fat-snake containing walls, bounced off with the sudden shock of weight from the grav field and crashed to the deck, trailing wings of smoke and flame from the wrecked impeller frame.

For a long moment, I lay still in the cavernous quiet of the bay.

Then, from somewhere, I heard a curious bubbling sound in my helmet. It took me several seconds to realise I was laughing.

Get up, Takeshi.

Oh, come on…

He can kill you just as dead in here, Tak. Get UP.

I reached out and tried to prop myself up. Wrong arm—the broken elbow joint bent soggily inside the mob suit. Pain ran up and down the abused muscles and tendons. I rolled away, gasping and tried with the other arm. Better. The mob suit wheezed a little, something definitely awry in the works here, but it got me up. Now get rid of the wreckage on my back. The emergency release still worked, sort of. I hauled myself clear, the Sunjet caught in the frame and would not tug loose on the tether line. I yanked at it for a senseless moment, then unseamed the tether instead and bent to free the weapon from the other side.

“Alri…vacs.” Carrera’s voice, trampled out by the interference from the interior structure. “If… tha… ay…ant it.”

He was coming in after me.

The Sunjet stuck.

Leave it!

And fight him with a pistol? In polalloy?

Weapons are an extension screamed an exasperated Virginia Vidaura, in my head—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. Leave it!

‘kay, Virginia. I sniggered a little. Whatever you say.

I lurched away towards the lintel-braced exit from the bay, drawing the interface pistol from its pouch. Wedge equipment was crated and stacked across the bay. The locater beacon, dumped unceremoniously, still powered at standby, the way Carrera had presumably left it. A nearby crate cracked open, sections of a disassembled Philips launcher protruding. Haste written into the details of the scene, but it was a soldierly haste. Controlled speed. Combat competence, a man at his trade. Carrera was in his element.

Get the fuck out of here, Tak.

Into the next chamber. Martian machines stirred, bristled and then sloped sullenly away from me, muttering to themselves. I limped past them, following the painted arrows, no, don’t fucking follow the arrows. I ducked left at the next opportunity and plunged along a corridor the expedition had not taken before. A machine snuffled after me a few paces, then went back.

I thought I heard the sound of motion behind and above me. A jerked glance up into the shadowed space overhead. Ludicrous.

Get a grip, Tak. It’s the ‘meth. You did too much and now you’re hallucinating.

More chambers, intersecting curves one into another and always the space above. I stopped myself rigidly from looking up. The pain from the grenade shards in my leg and shoulder was beginning to seep up through the chemical armour of the tetrameth, waking echoes in my ruined left hand and the shattered joint in my right elbow. The furious energy I’d felt earlier had decayed to a jumpy sense of speed and vibrating riffs of inexplicable amusement that threatened to emerge as giggling.

In that state, I backed through into a tight, closed chamber, turned about and came face to face with my last Martian.

This time, the mummified wing membranes were folded down around the skeletal frame, and the whole thing was crouched on a low roost bar. The long skull drooped forward over the chest, hiding the light gland. The eyes were closed.

It lifted its beak and looked up at me.

No. It fucking didn’t.

I shook my head, crept closer to the corpse and stared at it. From somewhere, an impulse arose to caress the long bone ridge on the back of the skull.

“I’ll just sit here for a while,” I promised, stifling another giggle. “Quietly. Just a couple of hours, that’s all I need.”

I lowered myself to the floor on my uninjured arm, leaned against the sloping wall behind us, clutching the interface gun like a charm. My body was a warm twisting together of limp ropes inside the cage of the mob suit, a faintly quivering assemblage of soft tissue with no more will to animate its exoskeleton. My gaze slipped up into the gloomy space at the top of the chamber and for a while I thought I saw pale wings beating there, trying to escape the imprisoning curve. At some point, though, I spotted the fact that they were in my head, because I could feel their paper-thin texture brushing around the inner surface of my skull, scraping minutely but painfully at the insides of my eyeballs and obscuring my vision by degrees, pale to dark, pale to dark, pale to dark, to dark, to dark—

And a thin, rising whine like grief.

“Wake up, Kovacs.”

The voice was gentle, and there was something nudging at my hand. My eyes seemed to be gummed shut. I lifted one arm and my hand bumped off the smooth curve of the faceplate.

“Wake up.” Less gentle now. A tiny jag of adrenalin went eeling along my nerves at the change in tone. I blinked hard and focused. The Martian was still there—no shit, Tak—but my view of the corpse was blocked by the figure in the polalloy suit that stood a safe three or four metres out of reach, Sunjet carried at a wary angle.

The nudging at my hand recommenced. I tipped the helmet and looked down. One of the Martian machines was stroking at my glove with an array of delicate-looking receptors. I shoved it away, and it backed up chittering a couple of places, then came sniffing back undeterred.

Carrera laughed. It rang too loud in the helmet receiver. I felt as if the fluttering wings had somehow hollowed out my head so that my whole skull wasn’t much less delicate than the mummified remains I was sharing the chamber with.

“That’s right. Fucking thing led me to you, can you believe that? Really helpful little beastie.”

At that point, I laughed too. It seemed the only thing appropriate to the moment. The Wedge commander joined in. He held up the interface gun in his left hand, and laughed louder.

“Were you going to kill me with this?”

“Doubt it.”

We both stopped laughing. His faceplate hinged up and he looked down at me out of a face gone slightly haggard around the eyes. I guessed even the short time he’d spent tracking me through the Martian architecture hadn’t been a lot of fun.

I flexed my palm, once, on the off-chance that Loemanako’s gun might not have been personally coded, that any Wedge palm plate might be able to call it. Carrera caught the move and shook his head. He tossed the weapon into my lap.

“Unloaded anyway. Hold on to it if you like—some men go better that way, holding a gun tight. Seems to help at the end. Substitute for something, I guess. Mother’s hand. Your dick. You want to stand up to die?”

“No,” I said softly.

“Open your helmet?”

“What for?”

“Just giving you the option.”

“Isaac—” I cleared my throat of what felt like a web of rusted wire. Words scraped through. It seemed suddenly very important to say them. “Isaac, I’m sorry.”

You will be

It flared through me like tears up behind my eyes. Like the wolf-weeping loss that Loemanako’s and Kwok’s deaths had brought up through my throat.

“Good,” he said simply. “But a little late.”

“Have you seen what’s behind you, Isaac?”

“Yeah. Impressive, but very dead. No ghosts that I’ve seen.” He waited. “Do you have anything else to say?”

I shook my head. He raised the Sunjet.

“This is for my murdered men,” he said.

“Look at the fucking thing.” I screamed, every increment of Envoy intonation pushed into it and for just a fraction of a second his head shifted. I came up off the floor, flexing in the mob suit, hurling the interface gun into the space below his hinged-up faceplate and diving at him low.

Miserly shavings of luck, a tetrameth crash and my fading grip on Envoy combat poise. It was all I had left and I took it all across the space between us, teeth bared. When the Sunjet crackled, it hit where I’d been. Maybe it was the shouted distraction, shifting his focus, maybe the gun hurtling towards his face, maybe just this same tired general sense that it was all over.

He staggered backwards as I hit him, and I trapped the Sunjet between our bodies. He slid into a combat judo block that would have thrown an unarmoured man off his hip. I hung on with the stolen strength of Loemanako’s suit. Another two stumbling backsteps and we both smashed into the mummified Martian corpse together. The frame tipped and collapsed. We tumbled over it like clowns, staggering to get up as we slipped. The corpse disintegrated. Powder burst of pale orange in the air around us.

I’m sorry.

You will be, if the skin crumbles.

Faceplate up, panting, Carrera must have sucked in a lungful of the stuff. More settled on his eyes and the exposed skin of his face.

The first yell as he felt it eating in.

Then the screams.

He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then, the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.

He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.

I’m sorry.

I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.

“That’s wonderful,” he breathed. “The stuff of epics.”

“Stop that,” I told him.

“No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.”

“Well,” I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. “You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the fucking thing.”

“You may laugh.” There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. “But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?”

I poured my glass half full of whisky again. “Kemp manages.”

“Oh, that’s politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu—” he snapped his fingers. “Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?”

“Communitarianism.”

“Yes, that.” He shook his head sagely. “That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savour? Where’s the blood and adrenalin?”

I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.

Pity they didn’t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.

I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.

“Plenty of blood out there at the moment,” I observed.

“Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.”

“Thought you would.”

“In less than a year he’d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn’t, his own people would, uh, vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to go quietly.”

“Yes, that’s the problem with voting,” said Roespinoedji judiciously. “Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?”

“Kemp? Yeah, a few times.”

“And what was he like?”

He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same goddamned fucking conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.

“Tall,” I said. “He was tall.”

“Ah. Well, yes, he would be.”

I turned to look at the boy beside me. “Doesn’t it worry you, Djoko? What’s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?”

He grinned. “I doubt their political assessors are any different to the Cartel’s. Everyone has appetites. And besides. With what you’ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul.” His look sharpened. “Allowing that we have dismantled all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is.”

“Relax. I told you, I only ever set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it’d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for.”

“Hmm.” Roespinoedji rolled whisky around in the base of his glass. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. “Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?”

I shrugged. “What if? Hand could never risk assuming he’d found all of them, too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff.”

“Yes. Well, you’re the Envoy.” He prodded at the slim hand-sized slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. “And you’re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognise this broadcast?”

“Trust me.” Just the words brought a grin to my lips. “State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission’s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition.”

Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. “Alright. Enough. We’ve got an agreement. Don’t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling.”

“You’d just better not be fucking with me,” I said amiably.

“I’m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy,” he sniffed. “In Landfall, at any rate.”

“And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek.”

“That’s a strange attitude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world.”

“Figure of speech. A good technician. Don’t go cutting corners on me.”

“Well, if you don’t trust me,” he said huffily, “why don’t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you?”

“She’ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a fuck-up.”

“I’m sure she does. She seems very competent.”

I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every manoeuvre and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse, and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.

“Yes. She is.”

“You know,” Roespinoedji chuckled. “Last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked.”

I shivered again. “Yeah. Wasn’t easy.”

We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji’s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like woodsmoke from someone else’s beach barbecue.

“Did you give it a name?” Roespinoedji wondered finally. “This starship.”

“No, there wasn’t really that kind of time.”

“So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?”

I shrugged.

“The Wardani?”

“Ah.” He looked at me shrewdly. “And would she like that?”

I picked up my glass and drained it.

“How the fuck would I know?”

She’d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knock-off, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji’s place, she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out.

I didn’t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it any more and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.

Roespinoedji was sold.

The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji’s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instill fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.

“It’s cool,” she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. “Why don’t you go talk to Tanya. I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.”

“To me?”

The pilot shrugged impatiently. “To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.”

“Is she still in her room?”

“She went out.” Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that constituted Dig 27’s town centre. “Go. I’ll watch these guys.”

I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the façade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.

She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn’t let go of.

“You following me?”

“Not intentionally,” I lied. “Sleep well?”

She shook her head. “I can still hear Sutjiadi.”

“Yeah.”

When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. “You going in here?”

“Are you fucking—? No. I only stopped to…” and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.

I peered at the glyphs. “Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?”

She almost smiled.

“No.” She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. “It’s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It’s sort of a grafiti as well. It says.” She stopped, shook her head again. “There’s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good shit before you go up in a populated area.”

“You’re winding me up. It doesn’t say that.”

“It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too.” She turned away. “They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell.”

The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.

“I was going to the dighead,” she said. “That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—”

“Sure. I’ll walk with you.”

She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.

“Maybe I should get one of those.”

“Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.”

We plodded up the slope.

“You sure this is going to come off?” she asked.

“What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?”

“I think he’s a fucking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.”

“Tanya,” I said gently. “It wasn’t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji’s getting the deal of the millennium, and he knows it. He’s solid on this one, believe me.”

“Well. You’re the Envoy.”

The café was pretty much as I remembered it, a forlorn-looking herd of moulded chairs and tables gathered in the shade cast by the massive stanchions and struts of the dighead frame. A holomenu fluoresced weakly overhead, and a muted Lapinee playlist seeped into the air from speakers hung on the structure. Martian artefacts stood about the place in no particular pattern that I could discern. We were the only customers.

A terminally bored waiter sloped out of hiding somewhere and stood at our table, looking resentful. I glanced up at the menu then back at Wardani. She shook her head.

“Just water,” she said. “And cigarettes, if you’ve got them.”

“Site Sevens or Will to Victory?”

She grimaced. “Site Sevens.”

The waiter looked at me, obviously hoping I wasn’t going to spoil his day and order some food.

“Got coffee?”

He nodded.

“Bring me some. Black, with whisky in it.”

He trudged away. I raised an eyebrow at Wardani behind his back.

“Leave him alone. Can’t be much fun working here.”

“Could be worse. He could be a conscript. Besides,” I gestured around me at the artefacts. “Look at the décor. What more could you want?”

A wan smile.

“Takeshi.” She hunched forward over the table. “When you get the virtual gear installed. I, uh, I’m not going with you.”

I nodded. Been expecting this.

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you apologising to me for?”

“You, uh. You’ve done a lot for me in the last couple of months. You got me out of the camp—”

“We pulled you out of the camp because we needed you. Remember.”

“I was angry when I said that. Not with you, but—”

“Yeah, with me. Me, Schneider, the whole fucking world in a uniform.” I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. And you were right. We got you out because we needed you. You don’t owe me anything.”

She studied her hands where they lay in her lap.

“You helped put me back together again, Takeshi. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but that Envoy recovery shit works. I’m getting better. Slowly, but it’s off that base.”

“That’s good.” I hesitated, then made myself say it. “Fact remains, I did it because I needed you. Part of the rescue package; there was no point in getting you out of the camp if we left half your soul behind.”

Her mouth twitched. “Soul?”

“Sorry, figure of speech. Too much time hanging around Hand. Look, I’ve got no problem with you bailing out. I’m kind of curious to know why, is all.”

The waiter toiled back into view at that point, and we quietened. He laid out the drinks and the cigarettes. Tanya Wardani slit the pack and offered me one across the table. I shook my head.

“I’m quitting. Those things’ll kill you.”

She laughed almost silently and fed herself one from the pack. Smoke curled up as she touched the ignition patch. The waiter left. I sipped at my whisky coffee and was pleasantly surprised. Wardani plumed smoke up into the dighead frame space.

“Why am I staying?”

“Why are you staying?”

She looked at the table top. “I can’t leave now, Takeshi. Sooner or later, what we found out there is going to get into the public domain. They’ll open the gate again. Or take an IP cruiser out there. Or both.”

“Yeah, sooner or later. But right now there’s a war in the way.”

“I can wait.”

“Why not wait on Latimer? It’s a lot safer there.”

“I can’t. You said yourself, transit time in the ‘Chandra has got to be eleven years, minimum. That’s full acceleration, without any course correction Ameli might have to do. Who knows what’s going to have happened back here in the next eleven years?”

“The war might have ended, for one thing.”

“The war might be over next year, Takeshi. Then Roespinoedji’s going to move on his investment, and when that happens, I want to be here.”

“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trust him any more than Hand. Now you want to work for him?”

“We, uh,” she looked at her hands again. “We talked about it this morning. He’s willing to hide me until things have calmed down. Get me a new sleeve.” She smiled a little sheepishly. “Guild Masters are thin on the ground since the war kicked in. I guess I’m part of his investment.”

“Guess so.” Even while the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t work out why I was trying so hard to talk her out of this. “You know that won’t help much if the Wedge come looking for you, don’t you?”

“Is that likely?”

“It could ha—” I sighed. “No, not really. Carrera’s probably backed up somewhere in a sneak station, but it’ll be a while before they realise that he’s dead. While longer before they sort the authorisation to sleeve the back-up copy. And even if he does get out to Dangrek, there’s nobody left to tell him what happened there.”

She shivered and looked away.

“It had to be done, Tanya. We had to cover our traces. You of all people should know that.”

“What?” Her eyes flicked back in my direction.

“I said. You of all people should know that.” I kept her gaze. “It’s what you did last time around. Isn’t it.”

She looked away again, convulsively. Smoke curled up off her cigarette and was snatched away by the breeze. I leaned into the silence between us.

“It doesn’t much matter now. You don’t have the skills to sink us between here and Latimer, and once we’re there you’ll never see me again. Would. Never have seen me again. And now you’re not coming with us. But like I said, I’m curious.”

She moved her arm as if it wasn’t connected to her, drew on the cigarette, exhaled mechanically. Her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.

“How long have you known?”

“Known?” I thought about it. “Honestly, I think I’ve known from the day we pulled you out of the camp. Nothing I could lock down, but I knew there was a problem. Someone tried to bust you out before we came. The camp commandant let that slip, in between fits of drooling.”

“Sounds unusually animated, for him.” She drew more smoke, hissed it out between her teeth.

“Yeah, well. Then of course there were your friends down on the rec deck at Mandrake. Now that one I really should have spotted on the launch pad. I mean, it’s only the oldest whore’s trick in the book. Lead the mark up a darkened alley by his dick, and hand him over to your pimp.”

She flinched. I forced a grin.

“Sorry. Figure of speech. I just feel kind of stupid. Tell me, was that gun-to-your-head stuff just tinsel, or were they serious?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “They were revolutionary guard cadres. Kemp’s hard men. They took out Deng when he came sniffing around after them. Really dead, stack torched and body sold off for spares. They told me that while we were waiting for you. Maybe to scare me, I don’t know. They probably would have shot me sooner than let me go again.”

“Yeah, they convinced the fuck out of me as well. But you still called them in, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said it to herself, as if discovering the truth for the first time. “I did.”

“Care to tell me why?”

She made a tiny motion, something that might have been her head shaking, or just a shiver.

“OK. Want to tell me how?”

She got herself back together, looked at me. “Coded signal. I set it up while you and Jan were out casing Mandrake. Told them to wait on my signal, then placed a call from my room in the tower when I was sure we were definitely going to Dangrek.” A smile crossed her face, but her voice could have been a machine’s. “I ordered underwear. From a catalogue. Locational code in the numbers. Basic stuff.”

I nodded. “Were you always a Kempist?”

She shifted impatiently. “I’m not from here, Kovacs. I don’t have any political, I don’t have any right to a political stance here.” She shot me an angry look. “But for Christ’s sake, Kovacs. It’s their fucking planet, isn’t it?”

“That sounds pretty much like a political stance to me.”

“Yeah, must be really nice not to have any beliefs.” She smoked some more, and I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. “I envy you your smug sanctimonious fucking detachment.”

“Well, it’s not hard to come by, Tanya.” I tried to curb the defensiveness in my voice. “Try working local military adviser to Joshua Kemp while Indigo City comes apart in civil riots around you. Remember those cuddly little inhib systems Carrera unloaded on us? First time I saw those in use on Sanction IV? Kemp’s guardsmen were using them on protesting artefact merchants in Indigo City, a year before the war kicked in. Maxed up, continuous discharge. No mercy for the exploitative classes. You get pretty detached after the first few street cleanups.”

“So you changed sides.” It was the same scorn I’d heard in her voice that night in the bar, the night she drove Schneider away.

“Well, not immediately. I thought about assassinating Kemp for a while, but it didn’t seem worth it. Some family member would have stepped in, some fucking cadre. And by then, the war was looking pretty meltable anyway. And like Quell says, these things need to run their hormonal course.”

“Is that how you survive it?” she whispered.

“Tanya. I have been trying to leave ever since.”

“I,” she shuddered. “I’ve watched you, Kovacs. I watched you in Landfall, in that firefight at the promoter’s offices, in the Mandrake Tower, the beach at Dangrek with your own men. I, I envied you what you have. How you live with yourself.”

I took brief refuge in my whisky coffee. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I can’t.” A helpless, fending gesture. “I can’t get them out of my head. Dhasanapongsakul, Aribowo, the rest of them. Most of them, I didn’t even see die, but they. Keep.” She swallowed hard. “How did you know?”

“You want to give me a cigarette now?”

She handed over the pack, wordlessly. I busied myself with lighting and inhaling, to no noticeable benefit. My system was so bombed on damage and Roespinoedji’s drugs, I would have been amazed if there had been. It was the thin comfort of habit, not much more.

“Envoy intuition doesn’t work like that,” I said slowly. “Like I said, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t want to take it on board. You uh, you make a good impression, Tanya Wardani. At some level, I didn’t want to believe it was you. Even when you sabotaged the hold—”

She started. “Vongsavath said—”

“Yeah, I know. She still thinks it was Schneider. I haven’t told her any different. I was pretty much convinced it was Schneider myself after he ran out on us. Like I said, I didn’t want to think it might be you. When the Schneider angle showed up, I went after it like a heatseeker. There was a moment in the docking bay when I worked him out. You know what I felt? I was relieved. I had my solution and I didn’t have to think about who else might be involved any more. So much for detachment, huh.”

She said nothing.

“But there were a whole stack of reasons why Schneider couldn’t be the whole story. And the Envoy conditioning just went on racking them up ‘til there was too much to ignore any more.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this.” I reached into a pocket and shook out a portable datastack. The membrane settled on the table and motes of light evolved in the projected datacoil. “Clean that space off for me.”

She looked at me curiously, then leaned forward and lobbed the display motes up to the top left-hand corner of the coil. The gesture echoed back in my head, the hours of watching her work in the screens of her own monitors. I nodded and smiled.

“Interesting habit. Most of us flatten down to the surface. More final, more satisfying I guess. But you’re different. You tidy upward.”

“Wycinski. It’s his.”

“That where you picked it up?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Probably.”

“You’re not Wycinski, are you?”

It startled a short laugh out of her. “No, I’m not. I worked with him at Bradbury, and on Nkrumah’s Land, but I’m half his age. Why would you think something like that?”

“Nothing. Just crossed my mind. You know, that cybersex virtuality. There was a lot of male tendency in what you did to yourself. Just wondered, you know. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a man?”

She smiled at me. “Wrong, Takeshi. Wrong way round. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a woman.”

For just a moment, something warm sparked between us, already fading as it came into being. Her smile washed away.

“So you were saying?”

I pointed at the datacoil. “That’s the pattern you leave after shutdown. That’s the pattern you left in the cabin datacoil on board the trawler. Presumably after you slammed the gate on Dhasanapongsakul and his colleagues, after you took out the two on the trawler and dumped them in the nets. I saw it the morning after the party. Didn’t notice at the time, but like I said that’s Envoys for you. Just go on acquiring little scraps of data until it means something.”

She was staring intently at the datacoil, but I still spotted the tremor go through her when I said Dhasanapongsakul’s name.

“There were other scraps, once I started to look. The corrosion grenades in the hold. Sure, it took Schneider to shut down the onboard monitors on the Nagini, but you were fucking him. Old flame, in fact. I don’t suppose you had any harder time talking him into it than you did in getting me down to the rec deck at Mandrake. It didn’t fit at first, because you were pushing so hard to get the claim buoy aboard. Why go to the trouble of trying to put the buoys out of commission in the first place, then work so hard to get the remaining one placed.”

She nodded jerkily. Most of her was still dealing with Dhasanapongsakul. I was talking into a vacuum.

“Didn’t make sense, that is, until I thought about what else had been put out of commission. Not the buoys. The ID&A sets. You trashed them all. Because that way no one was going to be able to put Dhasanapongsakul and the rest into virtual and find out what had happened to them. Of course, eventually we’d get them back to Landfall and find out. But then. You didn’t plan for us to make it back, did you?”

That got her back to me. A haggard stare across wreathed smoke.

“You know when I worked most of this out?” I sucked in my own smoke hard. “On the swim back to the gate. See, I was pretty much convinced it’d be closed by the time I got there. Wasn’t quite sure why I thought that at first, but it sort of fell into place. They’d gone through the gate, and the gate had closed on them. Why would that happen, and how did poor old Dhasanapongsakul end up on the wrong side wearing a T-shirt. Then I remembered the waterfall.”

She blinked.

“The waterfall?”

“Yeah, any normal human being, post-coital, would have shoved me in the back into that pool and then laughed. We both would have. Instead, you started crying.” I examined the end of my cigarette as if it interested me. “You stood at the gate with Dhasanapongsakul, and you pushed him through. And then you slammed it shut. It doesn’t take two hours to shut that gate, does it, Tanya?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Were you already thinking you might have to do the same thing to me? Then, at the waterfall?”

“I.” She shook her head. “Don’t know.”

“How did you kill the two on the trawler?”

“Stunner. Then the nets. They drowned before they woke up. I.” She cleared her throat. “I pulled them up again later, I was going to, I don’t know, bury them somewhere. Maybe even wait a few days and drag them to the gate, try to open it so I could dump them through as well. I panicked. I couldn’t stand to be there, wondering if Aribowo and Weng might find some way to open the gate again before their air ran out.”

She looked at me defiantly.

“I didn’t really believe that. I’m an archaeologue, I know how…” She was silent for a few moments. “I couldn’t even have opened it again myself in time to save them. It was just. The gate. What it meant. Sitting there on the trawler, knowing they were just the other side of that. Thing, suffocating. Millions of kilometres away in the sky above my head and still right there in the cavern. So close. Like something huge, waiting for me.”

I nodded. Back on the beach at Dangrek, I’d told Wardani and Vongsavath about the corpses I’d found sealed in the substance of the Martian vessel while Carrera and I hunted each other across the hull. But I never told either of them about my last half hour inside the ship, the things I’d seen and heard as I stumbled back out to the echoing desolation of the docking bay with Carrera’s impeller frame on my shoulders, the things I’d felt swimming beside me all the way back to the gate. After a while, my vision had narrowed down to that faint blur of light orbiting out in the blackness, and I didn’t want to look round for fear of what I might see, what might be hunched there, offering me its taloned hand. I just dived for the light, scarcely able to believe it was still there, terrified that at any moment it would slam shut and leave me locked out in the dark.

Tetrameth hallucination, I told myself later, and that was just going to have to do.

“So why didn’t you take the trawler?”

She shook her head again and stubbed out her cigarette.

“I panicked. I was cutting the stacks out of the two in the nets, and I just.” She shivered. “It was like something was staring at me. I dumped them back in the water, threw the stacks out to sea as far as I could. Then I just ran away. Didn’t even try to blow the cavern or cover my tracks. Walked all the way into Sauberville.” Her voice changed in some way I couldn’t define. “I got a ride with this guy in a ground car the last couple of klicks. Young guy with a couple of kids he was bringing back from a grav-gliding trip. I guess they’re all dead now.”

“Yes.”

“I. Sauberville wasn’t far enough. I ran south. I was in the Bootkinaree hinterlands when the Protectorate signed the accords. Cartel forces picked me up from a refugee column. Dumped me in the camp with the rest of them. At the time, it seemed almost like justice.”

She fumbled out a fresh cigarette and fitted it in her mouth. Her gaze slanted my way.

“That make you laugh?”

“No.” I drained my coffee. “Point of interest, though. What you were doing around Bootkinaree? Why not head back for Indigo City? You being a Kempist sympathiser and all.”

She grimaced. “I don’t think the Kempists would have been pleased to see me, Takeshi. I’d just killed their entire expedition. Would have been a little hard to explain.”

“Kempists?”

“Yeah.” There was a gritted amusement in her tone now. “Who’d you think bankrolled that trip? Vacuum gear, drilling and construction equipment, the analogue units and the dataprocessing system for the gate. Come on, Takeshi. We were on the edge of a war. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Who’d you think went in and wiped the gate from the Landfall archive?”

“Like I said,” I muttered. “I didn’t want to think about it. So it was a Kempist gig. So why’d you waste them?”

“I don’t know,” she gestured. “It seemed like. I don’t know, Kovacs.”

“Fair enough.” I crushed out my cigarette, resisted the temptation to take another, then took it anyway. I watched her and waited.

“It.” She stopped. Shook her head. Started again, enunciating with exasperated care. “I thought I was on their side. It made sense. We all agreed. In Kemp’s hands the ship would be a bargaining chip the Cartel couldn’t ignore. It could win the war for us. Bloodlessly.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then we found out it was a warship. Aribowo found a weapons battery up near the prow. Pretty unmistakable. Then another one. I, uh.” She stopped and sipped some water. Cleared her throat again. “They changed. Almost overnight, they all changed. Even Aribowo. She used to be so… It was like possession. Like they’d been taken over by one of those sentiences you see in experia horror flicks. Like something had come through the gate and…”

Another grimace.

“I guess I never knew them all that well after all. The two on the trawler, they were cadres. I didn’t know them at all. But they all went the same way. All talking about what could be done. The necessity of it, the revolutionary need. Vaporise Landfall from orbit. Power up whatever drives the ship had, they were speculating FTL now, talking about taking the war to Latimer. Doing the same thing there. Planetary bombardment. Latimer City, Portausaint, Soufriere. All gone, like Sauberville, until the Protectorate capitulated.”

“Could they have done that?”

“Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.” She shrugged. “Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing fucking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government channels, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Cant, political theory, all to shore up the use of a planetary massacre machine. And I’d given it to them. Without me, I don’t think they could have got the gate open again. They were just Scratchers. They needed me. They couldn’t get anyone else, the Guild Masters were all already on their way back to Latimer in cryocap liners, way ahead of the game, or holed up in Landfall waiting for their Guild-paid hypercasts to come through. Wang and Aribowo came looking for me in Indigo City. They begged me to help them. And I did.” There was something like a plea in her face as she turned to look at me. “I gave it to them.”

“But you took it away again,” I said gently.

Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.

“Were you planning to do the same to us?” I asked, when she seemed to have calmed. She tried to withdraw her hand, but I held onto it.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said urgently. “These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.”

A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was just surviving.”

“Good enough,” I told her.

We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.

Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.

I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.

“I hope he doesn’t come here,” she muttered.

“Sorry?”

“Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.”

“Will they let him come?”

She shrugged. “Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the running himself.” She shook her head. “But it’ll kill him. His precious Martians, fighting and dying in cohorts just like humans. Mass graves and planetary wealth condensed into war machines. It tears down everything he wanted to believe about them.”

“Well, predator stock…”

“I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old fucking song.”

“Same old fucking universe,” I pointed out gently.

“It’s just…”

“At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. “They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like running from a bomb blast. Like putting your hands out to stop a bullet.”

“And then the hull what, melted?”

She shook her head again, slowly. “I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,” she gestured, “I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.”

I shivered a little, remembering.

“It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,” she went on. “What we saw didn’t come close.”

I grunted. “Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?”

“No.”

“He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.”

She stopped in the street to look at me.

“Look, if it did…”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

“We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.”

“It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.”

“Statistically,” she breathed.

“Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?”

“Astronomical.”

“And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.”

“Unless.”

I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.

“That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.”

“We would have seen it,” she said uncertainly. “By now, we would have spotted some of them.”

“Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.”

She laughed, or something very like it.

“You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.”

I built another smile. “No. I’m not Wycinski, either.”

The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.

“Yeah?”

“Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.”

I looked at Wardani and sighed. “Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.”

I pocketed the phone and started down the street again. Wardani followed.

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr. I’m-Not-Wycinski?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.”

“Yes.”

The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.

She’d be alright.

It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.

It felt like a scab coming off.

“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.

“Yeah?”

“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”

She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.

“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”

“Right.”

Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.