Screams.
An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.
Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.
The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.
Silence.
Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her but could not get upright. No upper-body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.
“Stay there. I’ll be back.”
I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.
The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiraled up.
“Oh, shit.”
I ran back to the one I’d shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine’s struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I’d put in the center of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.
“Fuck.”
“Kovacs.”
“Yeah, sorry.” I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.
I sighed. “Here we go.”
They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.
“Remain still! Raise your hands!”
I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.
“I’m not pissing about here, folks!”
“We’re injured,” I called back. “Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout fail-safes. It’s all over. Go wake Hand up.”
• • •
Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal cord with a metal stylus.
“Molecular acid canister,” he said thoughtfully. “Last year’s Shorn Biotech. I didn’t realize the Kempists had these yet.”
“They’ve got everything you’ve got, Hand. They’ve just got a lot less of it, that’s all. Read your Brankovitch. Trickledown in War-Based Markets.”
“Yes, thank you, Kovacs.” Hand rubbed at his eyes. “I already have a doctorate in conflict investment. I don’t really need the gifted-amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.”
I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.
“We were fucking,” she said.
Hand blinked.
“Oh,” he said. “Already.”
“What’s that supposed t—”
“Kovacs, please. You’re giving me a headache.” He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad, who was hovering nearby. “Okay, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c-two-two-one-mh. Central clearing’ll let you have the codes.”
We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.
“Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,” he said. “Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.”
Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.
“Someone with wires to the inside, too,” I added somberly. “Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there’s no way they got in here without help. You’ve got leakage.”
“Yes, so it would appear.”
“Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar the night before last?”
Wardani looked at me, alarmed.
“Someone followed us?”
I gestured at Hand. “So he says.”
“Hand?”
“Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.” He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. “It was Deng, I think.”
“Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?”
“Deng had a clone on ice,” he snapped back. “That’s standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counseling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.”
“Was he? Why don’t you call him?”
I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.
Just-killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.
Hand had his audio phone open.
“Wake up Deng Zhao Jun, please.” He waited. “I see. Well, try that, then.”
I shook my head.
“That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh, Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.”
Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.
“Hand, I practically told him to do it.” I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. “Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.”
“I did not assign Deng, goddamn you, Kovacs.” He was hanging on to his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. “And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes, this is Hand.”
He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.
“Deng left the Tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.”
“Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?”
“Kovacs.” The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. “I don’t want to hear it. All right? I don’t. Want to hear it.”
I shrugged.
“No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.”
Hand breathed out, compressed. “I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.” He turned on his heel. “You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.”
I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.
Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.
“Oh.” He turned to face us. “By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred percent casualties.”
I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.
Hand stood there and watched it happen.
“Thought you’d both like to know that,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dangrek.
The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped
with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.
At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old-denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.
“Proud of yourself, Kovacs?”
Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from farther up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.
I went after her.
“You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,” I told her when I caught up. “And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.”
“Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.”
It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it nonstop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.
The M.A.I. had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating gray-fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.
“Sutjiadi, get your team deployed.”
It was Hand’s voice, drumming through the induction rig speaker. A loose exchange of military shorthand followed, and in irritation I yanked the speaker away from its resting place behind my ear. I ignored the footfalls of someone tramping up the slope behind us and focused on the locked posture of Tanya Wardani’s head and neck.
“I guess it was quick for them,” she said, still staring out at the headland.
“Like the song says. Nothing faster.”
“Mistress Wardani.” It was Ole Hansen, some echo of the arc-light intensity from his original blue eyes somehow burning through the wide-set dark gaze of his new sleeve. “We’ll need to see the demolition site.”
She choked back something that might have been a laugh and didn’t say the obvious thing.
“Sure,” she said instead. “Follow me.”
I watched the two of them pick their way down the other side of the slope toward the beach.
“Hoy! Envoy guy!”
I turned unwillingly and spotted Yvette Cruickshank navigating her Maori sleeve uncertainly up the slope toward me, Sunjet slung flat across her chest and a set of ranging lenses pushed up on her head. I waited for her to reach me, which she did without tripping in the long grass more than a couple of times.
“How’s the new sleeve,” I called as she stumbled for the second time.
“It—” She shook her head, closed the gap, and started again, voice lowered back to normal. “—’s a fraction strange, know what I mean?”
I nodded. My first resleeve was more than thirty subjective years in my past, objectively close to two centuries ago, but you don’t forget. The initial reentry shock never really goes away.
“Bit fucking pallid, too.” She pinched up the skin on the back of her hand and sniffed. “How come I couldn’t get some fine black cover like yours?”
“I didn’t get killed,” I reminded her. “Besides, once the radiation starts to bite, you’re going to be glad. What you’re wearing there needs about half the dosage I’ll be taking to stay operational.”
She scowled. “Still going to get us all in the end, though, isn’t it.”
“It’s only a sleeve, Cruickshank.”
“That’s right, just give me some of that Envoy cool.” She barked a laugh and upended her Sunjet, gripping the short, thick barrel disconcertingly in one slim hand. Squinting up from the discharge channel and directly at me, she asked, “Think you could go for a white-girl sleeve like this, then?”
I considered. The Maori combat sleeves were long on limb and broad in the chest and shoulders. A lot of them, like this one, were pale-skinned, and being fresh out of the clone tanks accentuated the effect, but faces ran to high cheekbones, wide-spaced eyes, and flaring lips and noses. White-girl sleeve seemed a little harsh. And even inside the shapeless battlefield chameleochrome coveralls . . .
“You going to look like that,” Cruickshank remarked, “you’d better be buying something.”
“Sorry. Just giving the question my full consideration.”
“Yeah. Skip it. I wasn’t that worried. You were operational around here, weren’t you?”
“A couple of months back.”
“So what was it like?”
I shrugged. “People shooting at you. Air full of pieces of fast-moving metal looking for a home. Pretty standard stuff. Why?”
“I heard the Wedge got a pasting. That true?”
“It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.”
“So how come Kemp suddenly decides, from a position of strength, to cut and nuke?”
“Cruickshank,” I started and then stopped, unable to think of a way to get through the armor plate of youth she was wearing. She was twenty-two, and like all twenty-two-year-olds she thought she was the immortal focal point of this universe. Sure, she’d been killed, but so far all that had done was prove the immortal part. It would not have occurred to her that there might be a worldview in which what she saw was not only marginal but almost wholly irrelevant.
She was waiting for an answer.
“Look,” I said finally. “No one told me what we were fighting for up here, and from what we got out of the prisoners we interrogated, I’d say they didn’t know, either. I gave up expecting this war to make sense a while ago, and I’d advise you to do the same if you plan on surviving much more of it.”
She raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that she hadn’t quite nailed in her new sleeve.
“So you don’t know, then?”
“No.”
“Cruickshank!” Even with my own induction rig unhooked, I heard the tinny crash of Markus Sutjiadi’s voice over the comlink. “You want to get down here and work for a living like the rest of us?”
“Coming, Cap.” She pulled a mouth-down face in my direction and started back down the slope. A couple of steps down, she stopped and turned back.
“Hey, Envoy guy.”
“Yeah?”
“That stuff about the Wedge taking a pasting? Wasn’t a crit, okay? Just what I heard.”
I felt myself grinning at the carefully deployed sensitivity.
“Forget it, Cruickshank. Couldn’t give a shit. I’m more bent out of shape you didn’t like me drooling on you.”
“Oh.” She grinned back. “Well, I guess I did ask.” Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she crossed her eyes for effect. “What about I get back to you on that one?”
“Do that.”
The induction rig buzzed against my neck. I stuck it back in place and hooked up the mike.
“Yeah, Sutjiadi?”
“If it’s not too much trouble, sir”—the irony dripped off the last word—“would you mind leaving my soldiers alone while they deploy?”
“Yeah, sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“Good.”
I was about to disconnect when Tanya Wardani’s voice came across the net in soft expletives.
“Who’s that?” snapped Sutjiadi. “Sun?”
“I don’t fucking believe this.”
“It’s Mistress Wardani, sir.” Ole Hansen came in, laconically calm, over the muttered curses from the archaeologue. “I think you’d better all get down here and take a look at this.”
• • •
I raced Hand to the beach and lost by a couple of meters. Cigarettes and damaged lungs don’t count in a virtuality, so it must have been concern for Mandrake’s investment that drove him. Very commendable. Still not attuned to their new sleeves, the rest of the party fell behind us. We reached Wardani alone.
We found her in much the same position she?
??d taken up facing the rockfall last time we’d been in the construct. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at.
“Where’s Hansen?” I asked stupidly.
“He went in,” she said, waving a hand forward. “For what it’s worth.”
Then I saw it. The pale bite marks of recent blasting, gathered around a two-meter fissure opened in the fall, and a path winding out of sight beyond.
“Kovacs?” There was a brittle lightness to the query in Hand’s tone.
“I see it. When did you update the construct?”
Hand stalked closer to examine the blasting marks. “Today.”
Tanya Wardani nodded to herself. “High-orbit satellite geoscan, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Well.” The archaeologue turned away and reached in her coat pocket for cigarettes. “We aren’t going to find anything out here, then.”
“Hansen!” Hand cupped his hands and shouted into the fissure, the induction rig he was wearing apparently forgotten.
“I hear you.” The demolitions expert’s voice came thrumming back on the rig, detached and edged with a smirk. “There’s nothing back here.”
“Of course there isn’t,” commented Wardani, to nobody in particular.
“. . . some kind of circular clearing, about twenty meters across, but the rocks look strange. Kind of fused.”
“That’s improvisation,” Hand said impatiently into the rig mike. “The M.A.I.’s guessing at what’s in there.”
“Ask him if there’s anything in the middle,” said Wardani, kindling her cigarette against the breeze off the sea.
Hand relayed the query. The answer crackled back over the set.
“Yeah, some kind of central boulder, maybe a stalagmite.”
Wardani nodded. “That’s your gate,” she said. “Probably old echo-sounding data the M.A.I. reeled in from some flyby area recon a while ago. It’s trying to map the data with what it can see from the orbital view, and since it’s got no reason to believe there’s anything in there but rocks—”