Wardani’s gaze dropped to the resonance scrambler on the bar. “Are you sure this thing is clean?”
“Nope. I got it from an indie dealer, but she came Mandrake-recommended, so it could be tagged for all I know. It doesn’t really matter. I’m the only person who knows how the reprisals are set up, and I’m not about to tell you about it.”
“Thanks.” There was no appreciable irony in her tone. An internment camp teaches you things about the value of not knowing.
“Don’t mention it.”
“And what about silencing us after the event?”
I spread my hands. “What for? Mandrake isn’t interested in silence. This’ll be the biggest coup a single corporate entity has ever pulled off. It’ll want it known. Those time-locked data launches we set are going to be the oldest news on the block when they finally decay. Once Mandrake has your starship hidden away somewhere safe, it’ll be dropping the fact through every major corporate dataport on Sanction Four. Hand’s going to use this to swing instant membership of the Cartel, and probably a seat on the Protectorate Commercial Council into the bargain. Mandrake’ll be a major player overnight. Our significance in that particular scheme of things will be nil.”
“Got it all worked out, huh?”
I shrugged again. “This isn’t anything we haven’t already discussed.”
“No.” She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. “I just didn’t think you’d be so fucking congenial with that piece of corporate shit.”
I sighed.
“Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He’ll do the job we want him to do. That’s what counts. We’ve been paid, we’re on board, and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I’m concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I’ll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?”
Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. “You’d better hope this isn’t tagged. If Hand’s listening to you . . .”
“Well,” I reached across her and picked up Schneider’s untouched drink. “If he is, he’s probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here’s to mistrust and mutual deterrence.”
I knocked back the rum and upended the glass on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.
“Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need.”
“What you need,” I said, yawning, “is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the Tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew.”
“I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn’t an issue.”
I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. “Yeah, well. Probably isn’t, but we’re supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be bloody-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think? Want to walk?”
“Going to hold my hand?” It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other’s personal space.
The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.
I turned to crush out my cigarette.
“Sure,” I said, trying for lightness. “It’s dark out there.”
I pocketed the scrambler and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.
It’s dark out there.
Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The top three floors of the Mandrake Tower were executive residential, access barred from below and topped off with a multilevel roof complex of gardens and cafés. A variable-permeate power screen strung from parapet pylons kept the sun fine-tuned for luminous warmth throughout the day, and in three of the cafés you could get breakfast at any hour. We got it at midday and were still working our way through the last of the spread when an immaculately attired Hand came looking for us. If he’d been listening in on last night’s character assassination, it didn’t seem to have upset him much.
“Good morning, Mistress Wardani. Gentlemen. I trust your night out on the town proved worth the security risk.”
“Had its moments.” I reached out and speared another dim sum parcel with my fork, not looking at either of my companions. Wardani had in any case retreated behind her sunlenses the moment she sat down, and Schneider was brooding intently on the dregs in his coffee cup. The conversation had not been sparkling so far. “Sit down, help yourself.”
“Thank you.” Hand hooked out a chair and seated himself. On closer inspection, he looked a little tired around the eyes. “I’ve already had lunch. Mistress Wardani, the primary components from your hardware list are here. I’m having them brought up to your suite.”
The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.
Don’t ask.
“Well. We’re about ready to recruit, Lieutenant, if you—”
“Fine.” I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. “Let’s go.”
No one said anything. Schneider didn’t even look up, but Wardani’s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.
We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator that named each floor for us as we passed it and outlined a few of Mandrake’s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-glass walls of the basement level. Illuminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing, and on the far side of the open space a blob of hard sunlight signaled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-colored cruiser was waiting.
“Thaisawasdi Field,” said Hand, leaning into the driver’s compartment. “The Soul Market.”
The engine note dialed up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automold cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarized glass of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly toward the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiraled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.
Hand touched a stud on the door and the glass polarized blue.
“You were followed last night,” he said matter-of-factly.
I glanced across the compartment at him. “What for? We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”
“Not by us.” He made an impatient gesture. “Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that’s how we spotted them. But I’m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider—which incidentally wasn’t all that intelligent—and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn’t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge.”
“How many?”
“Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved.”
“Did you pick them up?”
“No.” Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. “The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they’d gone to ground near the Latimer canal head, and by the time we got there, they were gone. We looked, but . . .”
He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He’d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.
“What are you grinning about?”
“Sorry. Just touched. Protect
and retrieve, huh?”
“Ha ha.” He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. “So, is there something you want to tell me?”
I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.
“Are you certain?”
“Hand, be serious. If I’d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they’d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?”
“So who were they?”
“I thought I just told you I didn’t know. Street scum, maybe?”
He gave me a pained look. “Street scum following a Carrera’s Wedge uniform?”
“Okay, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You’ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven’t you?”
“Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn’t notice them, how likely is it they were that low grade?”
I sighed. “Not very.”
“Precisely. So who else is trying to carve themselves a slice of artifact pie?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted gloomily.
The rest of the flight passed in silence.
Finally, the cruiser banked about and I tipped a glance out the window. We were spiraling down toward what looked like a sheet of dirty ice littered with used bottles and cans. I frowned and recalibrated for scale.
“Are these the original—?”
Hand nodded. “Some of them, yes. The big ones. The rest are impounds, stuff from when the bottom fell out of the artifact market. Soon as you can’t pay your landing slot, they grab your haulage and grav-lift it out here until you do. Of course, with the way the market went, hardly anyone bothered even trying to pay off what they owed, so the Port Authority salvage crews went in and decommissioned them with plasma cutters.”
We drifted in over the nearest of the grounded colony barges. It was like floating across a vast felled tree. Up at one end, the thrust assemblies that had propelled the vessel across the gulf between Latimer and Sanction IV were spread like branches, crushed to the landing field underneath and fanned stiffly against the hard blue sky above. The barge would never lift again, had in fact never been intended for more than a one-way trip. Assembled in orbit around Latimer a century ago, built only for the long blast across interstellar space and a single planetfall at journey’s end, she would have burned out her antigrav landing system coming down. The detonation of the final touchdown repulsor jets would have fused the desert sand beneath into an oval of glass that would eventually be extended by engineers to join the similar ovals left by other barges and so create Thaisawasdi Field, to serve the fledgling colony for the first decade of its life.
By the time the corporates got around to building their own private fields and the associated complexes, the barges would have been gutted—used initially to live out of, then as a ready source of refined alloys and hardware to build from. On Harlan’s World, I’d been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalized, carved back to multileveled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull. Only the hulls themselves were ever left intact, out of some bizarre quasi-reverence of the kind that in earlier ages got successive generations to give up their lives to build cathedrals.
The cruiser crossed the spine of the barge and slid down the curve of the hull to a soft landing in the pool of shadow the grounded vessel cast by. We climbed out into sudden cool and a quiet broken only by the whisper of a breeze across the glass plain and, faintly, the human sounds of commerce from within the hull.
“This way.” Hand nodded at the curving wall of alloy before us and strode in toward a triangular cargo vent near ground level. I caught myself scanning the edifice for possible sniper points, shrugged off the reflex irritably, and went after him. The wind swept detritus obligingly out of my way in little knee-high swirls.
Close up, the cargo vent was huge, a couple of meters across at its apex and wide enough at base to permit the passage of a trolleyed marauder bomb fuselage. The loading ramp that led up to the entrance had doubled as a hatch when the barge was in flight and now squatted on massive hydraulic haunches that hadn’t worked in decades. At the top the vent was flanked with carefully blurred holographic images that might have been either Martians or angels in flight.
“Dig art,” Hand said disparagingly. Then we were past them and into the vaulted gloom beyond.
It was the same feeling of decayed space that I’d seen on Harlan’s World, but where the Harlan fleet hulks had been preserved with museum sobriety, this space was filled with a chaotic splatter of color and sound. Stalls built from bright primary plastics and wire were cabled and epoxied seemingly at random up the curve of the hull and across what remained of the principal decks, giving the impression that a colony of poisonous mushrooms had infected the original structure. Sawn-off sections of companionway and ladders of welded support struts linked it all together. Here and there more holographic art lent extra flare to the glow of lamps and illuminum strips. Music wailed and basslined unpredictably from hull-mounted speakers the size of crates. High above it all, someone had punched meter-wide holes in the hull alloy so that beams of solid sunlight blasted through the gloom at tall angles.
At the impact point of the closest beam stood a tall, raggedly dressed figure, sweat-beaded black face turned up to the light as if it were a warm shower. There was a battered black top hat jammed on his head and an equally well-used long black coat draped across his gaunt frame. He heard our steps on the metal and pivoted, arms held cruciform.
“Ah, gentlemen.” The voice was a prosthetic bubbling, emitted by a rather obvious leech unit stapled to the scarred throat. “You are just in time. I am Semetaire. Welcome to the Soul Market.”
• • •
Up on the axial deck, we got to watch the process begin.
As we stepped out of the cage elevator, Semetaire moved aside and gestured with one rag-feathered arm.
“Behold,” he said.
Out on the deck, a tracked cargo loader was backing up with a small scoop held high in its lifting arms. As we watched, the scoop tilted forward and something started to spill over the lip, cascading onto the deck and bouncing up again with a sound like hailstones.
Cortical stacks.
It was hard to tell without racking up the neurachem vision, but most of them looked too bulky to be clean. Too bulky, and too whitish—yellow with the fragments of bone and spinal tissue that still clung to the metal. The scoop hinged farther back, and the spillage became a rush, a coarse white-noised outpouring of metallic shingle. The cargo loader continued to backtrack, laying a thick, spreading trail of the stuff. The hailstorm built to a quick drumming fury, then choked up as the continuing cascade of stacks was soaked up by the mounds that had already fallen.
The scoop upended, emptied. The sound stopped.
“Just in,” observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. “Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid-deployment casualties as well. We’re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp’s ground cover pretty badly.”
“Not for the first time,” I muttered.
“Nor the last, we hope.” Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. “Business has rarely been this good.”
Something scraped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.
All the way around the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, scraping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel load rattled in the buckets like gravel.
For all the competition for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me, and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I
guessed, and I watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.
“Most sell by gross weight,” he murmured. “It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire.”
“Get to the point,” Hand said curtly.
Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man’s voice. “The point,” he said courteously, “is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire.
“What do you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge Wolf?”
I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.
Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn’t recognize and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.
“You are playing a dangerous game,” the Mandrake exec said quietly. “And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?”
Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimeters. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.
“Slowly,” I suggested.
“There is no problem here, Kovacs.” Hand’s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire’s. “The family ties have been established now.”