“So how come the mob suit?” I asked Loemanako as he led us down toward the unloading area.
He shrugged. “Cable batteries at Rayong. Our tinsel systems went down at a bad time. Got my left leg, hip bone, 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 recognized. 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 anymore. 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,” Tanya Wardani said 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 acknowledgment 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,” the Wedge commander said 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 authorized at Cartel level.”
“Not anymore. 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 that 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 civilized 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 ultracompact. A hint of bulk inside the closed fist, a fishtailed 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 backward 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 ultracompacts 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 setup.
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 civilized man, Hand, I’m a soldier. A professional savage, and I’m for rent 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 toward 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 gotten 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 toward him: Peripheral scan, still squeezed to aching point by the adrenaline 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 toward Carrera, fingers oddly 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 fetal 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 and 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 earned 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 gray fist-size inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty meters. 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 jeweled 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 toward 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 adrenaline to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shriveled 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. Cleared colonial embargo only 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 stylized 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 carv
ed apart before someone locked this motherfucker down.”
“No one gets away with that,” Loemanako said somberly. “Right, Lieutenant? No local yokel takes down Wedge personnel and walks away from it. Shithead’s for the anatomizer.”
“Is this true?” I asked Carrera, for appearances’ sake.
He met my gaze and nodded. “Eyewitnesses. It’s open and shut.”
Sutjiadi stirred at his feet like something stomped 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 adrenaline jags of resistance set off new ripples of bites from their new neural jailers. In the postperformance 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 potbellied 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.