Semetaire’s grin said that wasn’t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn’t show.
“What is it you desire, company man?”
“Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger.”
“He’s not talking to you, Kovacs.” Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. “Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we’re in a hurry. Whatever you’ve got on the slab.”
Semetaire shrugged. “The freshest are here,” he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cyclinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. “But if you are pressed for time . . .”
He turned aside and led us to a somberly appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the bass-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors’ shovels and buckets behind us.
Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier, and she unwound herself languidly from among the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black-painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.
I glanced at Hand.
“The chosen of Ogon,” he said, without apparent irony. “Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors.”
He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes, and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.
“How many kilos do you want?” asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.
Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.
“How much are you going to gut me?”
“Seventy-nine fifty the kilo.”
The exec grunted. “Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it.”
“That’s a dross price and you know it, company man.” Semetaire shook his head, smiling. “Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn’t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard-conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior class, cleaned and anointed, and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other’s time in this way.”
“All right.” Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. “You’ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I’ll be back sometime.”
“Sometime.” Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. “Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead.”
“We may indeed.” Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. “And some of us sooner than others, if we go around making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire.”
The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.
“What would be the point in arresting me?” he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. “Look at this. Without me, you’d have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy.”
“Sixty-seven fifty, and I’ll make you Mandrake’s preferred supplier.”
Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. “Very well,” he said finally. “Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos.”
“Agreed.” Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. “I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up.”
Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.
“A find,” Semetaire said lightly, and grinned.
One of the crab-legged remotes had returned from the pile and, having reached Semetaire’s foot, was working its way steadily up his trouser leg. When it reached the level of his belt, he plucked it off and held it still while, with the other hand, he prized something from the thing’s mandibles. Then he tossed the little machine away. It drew in its limbs as it sensed the free fall and when it hit the deck, it was a featureless gray ovoid that bounced and rolled to a quick halt. A moment later, the limbs extended cautiously. The remote righted itself and scuttled off about its master’s business.
“Ahhh, look.” Semetaire was rubbing the tissue-flecked stack between his fingers and thumb, still grinning. “Look at that, Wedge Wolf. Do you see? Do you see how the new harvest begins?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Mandrake A.I. read the stack-stored soldiers we’d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they’d have done was scream themselves hoarse.
Hand shrugged it off.
“That’s about standard,” he said. “There’s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We’ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters.”
I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers’ data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional analog.
“Experience of high-rad combat environments?” I looked up at the Mandrake exec. “Is this something I should know about?”
“Come on, Kovacs. You already do.”
“I.” The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn’t seen light so harsh in geological eons. “Had hoped it wouldn’t turn out that way.”
Hand examined the tabletop as if it needed resheening. “We needed the peninsula cleared,” he said carefully. “By the end of the week it will be. Kemp’s pulling back. Call it serendipity.”
Once, on reconaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I’d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late-afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail—even with the neurachem racked up to maximum, the city looked like a silver bracelet flung down at the water’s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.
I met Hand’s eyes across the table.
“So we’re all going to die.”
He shrugged. “It seems unavoidable, doesn’t it? Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run . . .”
“Yeah, well, in the long run I’ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City.”
“Quite.”
“What kind of rad-t
olerant sleeves you have in mind?”
Another shrug. “Don’t know for sure, I’ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?”
I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.
“I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.” I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. “This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don’t build better for combat than this stuff.”
“And the antirad?”
“It’ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we’re done?”
Hand frowned at the question. “Well. Employment.”
“They had that. Look where it got them.”
“Employment in Landfall.” For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. “Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Those are three very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don’t really subscribe to any of them. But if you’re asking, Does it sound like a good alternative to being dead? I’d say so. If it were me, I’d probably want in at that price.”
“A vote of confidence.” Hand’s tone was withering. “How reassuring.”
“Provided, of course, I didn’t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the backdata.”
He looked at me. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“I can’t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city.” I shrugged. “Just now, anyway. Maybe that’s just me.”
“Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?”
I smiled thinly. “Don’t be absurd, Hand. I’m a soldier.”
“Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don’t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune.”
“Isn’t it just.” I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it were a fused grenade. “So let’s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?”
• • •
According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.
It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.
The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake A.I. with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us 387 possibles, with a high-probability core of 212.
“Time to wake them up,” said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.
Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging around the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn’t had that much to say to each other, either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scrolldown and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion, and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.
“Do we really have to talk to all of them?”
Hand shook his head. “No, we really don’t. There’s a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I’ll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That’s if you trust me that far.”
I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.
“Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?”
We left for the roof.
• • •
Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun’s juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening’s warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.
I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.
The language mix reminded me.
“Tell me, Hand.” I broke the seal on a new pack of Landfall Lights and drew one to life. “What was that shit out at the market today? That language the three of you were speaking, the left-handed gestures?”
Hand tasted his coffee and set it down. “You haven’t guessed?”
“Voodoo?”
“You might put it that way.” The pained look on the exec’s face told me he wouldn’t put it that way in a million years. “Though properly speaking it hasn’t been called that for several centuries. Neither was it called that back at the origin. Like most people who don’t know, you’re oversimplifying.”
“I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking.”
He smiled. “If that is the case, then the hard of thinking seem to be in a majority, do they not?”
“They always are.”
“Well, perhaps.” Hand drank more coffee and regarded me over the cup. “You really claim to have no God? No higher power? The Harlanites are mostly Shintoists, aren’t they? That, or some Christian offshoot?”
“I’m neither,” I said flatly.
“Then you have no refuge against the coming of night? No ally when the immensity of creation presses down on the spine of your tiny existence like a stone column a thousand meters tall?”
“I was at Innenin, Hand.” I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. “At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without.”
“God is not ours to command.”
“Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He’s playing a part, right?”
“Yes.” There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand’s voice now. “He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead—”
“Very witty.”
“—in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his competitors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more”—he offered me a slight smile—“accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste.”
“Strange, this Ghede hasn’t gotten around to making the same point, isn’t it?”
Hand sighed. “Actually, it’s very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humor of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused.”
“Really.” I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. “You believe this shit, right? I mean, seriously?”
The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.
“Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains, it might as well
carry the name of God. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?”
I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervor in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.
“Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren’t dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth’s surface or built anything resembling a machine. I’d say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here.”
Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in preindustrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long. We walk amid the ruins of a civilization that apparently had godlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords—”
“Whoa.” I lifted my hands, palms out. “Let’s damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan’s World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left.”
“Yes.” Hand gestured impatiently. “Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?”
“It’s a fucking machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict—”
“Can you be sure of that?”
He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity was stoked.
“Have you ever been to Harlan’s World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I’m telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artifact—”