Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.
Right, Takeshi?
My face twitched.
If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent resleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.
Don’t expect anything and—
And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.
Don’t—
Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.
This fucking war.
And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colors. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.
Sold.
CHAPTER TEN
Dangrek.
The coast huddled inward from a chilly gray sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low-growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favor of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometers inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.
A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d gotten up in that morning, and no jacket.
“Should be colder than this,” he said.
“Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.” I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. “This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real-time update?”
“Not as yet.” Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. “Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military A.I. projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes . . .”
He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking around at us.
“It’ll do,” she said distantly. “I guess an M.A.I. won’t have missed much.”
“Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.”
A long, turned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.
“Yes.” Another pause. “Of course. This way.”
She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant After you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.
A hundred meters ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down toward the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petaled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet gray.
I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometers in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.
We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Farther out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and around to the east where—
I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of gray unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the gray from within.
“Hand. What’s that?”
“That?” He saw where I was pointing. “Oh, that. Gray area.”
“I can see that.” Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. “What’s it doing there?”
But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the preknowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rockfall.
Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.
“It’s Sauberville,” she said flatly. “Isn’t it?”
Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. “That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The M.A.I. posits a fifty percent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.”
A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of 120,000.
“Reduced how?” I asked.
Hand shrugged. “It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.”
“Tactical nuke,” Schneider said tonelessly. “Riding a marauder delivery system.”
“Well, it’s what he’s got.” Hand shrugged again. “And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.”
“Motherfucking psycho,” said Schneider, apparently to the sky.
Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she were trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.
“So.” Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. “Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.”
Wardani turned away. “It’s down on the beach,” she said.
The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale-blue-shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practiced flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.
We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. Sh
e was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.
“That’s it.” She nodded ahead. “That’s where we buried it.”
“Buried it?” Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. “How exactly did you bury it?”
Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. “Use your eyes, man. How do you think?”
“You blew it up?”
“Bored charges.” Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. “Two meters in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.”
“You.” Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. “Blew up. An artifact?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.” Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. “Where do you think we found the fucking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery—this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.”
“I hope you’re right.” Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. “Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million U.N. dollars for damaged goods.”
“What brought the rock down?” I asked suddenly.
Schneider turned, grinning. “I told you, man. Bored—”
“No.” I was looking at Tanya Wardani. “I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction underwater, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?”
“Yeah, Tanya.” Schneider nodded vigorously. “You never did nail that one, did you? I mean, we talked about it, but . . .”
“It’s a good point.” Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. “What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?”
The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.
“Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.”
I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. “Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.”
“Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.”
“Leakage?” Hand asked dubiously.
Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy, now that Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the pack, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.
“Look,” she said finally. “This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does—at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.”
When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.
“All right. How long does a heavy-load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple-DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.” She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. “Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, meters wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours: That’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?”
“A lot of energy,” Hand said impatiently. “So what’s this about leakage?”
“Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. “And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ’cast duration of a few seconds; well, it doesn’t add up to much airtime. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilization with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.”
“Oops.”
The archaeologue flicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.
“Quite,” she said acidly. “Oops. Now, the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.”
I nodded. “So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—”
“And buries itself under five hundred thousand tons of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so Mistress Wardani.”
The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. “I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.”
“Or,” Schneider said brightly, “it could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?”
“We already talked about this, Jan.” Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. “It’s not—”
“It’s possible, all right.”
“Yes. It’s just not very likely.” She turned away from Schneider and faced me. “It’s hard to be sure—a lot of the glyphs were like nothing I’d ever seen before, and they’re hard to read—but I’m pretty certain there’s a power brake built in. Above certain velocities, nothing gets through.”
“You don’t know that for certain.” Schneider was sulking. “You said yourself you couldn’t—”
“Yes, but it makes sense, Jan. You don’t build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you’re likely to find out there.”
“Oh, come on, Tanya, what about—”
“Lieutenant Kovacs,” Hand said loudly. “Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I’d like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Sure.”
We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand’s shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out o
f nowhere, Hand spoke.
“Remarkable woman.”
I grunted.
“I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigors of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon . . .”
“She’ll be fine,” I said shortly.
“Yes, I’m sure she will.” A delicate pause. “I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.”
“That’s over, I think.”
“Oh, really?”
There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.
“About this military perspective, Hand.”
“Oh, yes.” The Mandrake exec stopped a few meters short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. “I’m not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn’t ideal fighting ground.”
“Got it in one.” I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. “Once we get down here, we’re a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It’s an open field of fire right back to the foothills.”
“And then there’s the sea.”
“And then there’s the sea,” I echoed gloomily. “We’re open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we’ll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That’s unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.”
“Hmm.” Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. “I’ve talked to the lawyers.”
“Did you disinfect afterward?”
“Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artifact in nonorbital space is only considered valid if a fully operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometer of said artifact. No loopholes, we’ve looked. If there’s a starship on the other side of this gate, we’re going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that’s going to take some time.”