Explosives aren’t good for much in vacuum combat. No shock wave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.
The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub shells into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-size razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.
It was the weapon that had ripped 391 Platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok’s eyes, Eddie Munharto’s limbs, and my shoulder.
Two months? Why does it feel like another lifetime?
The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turn from men and women into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those farther off just died in sudden pieces.
The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach and rocked the bug on its grav field.
There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.
I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.
Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.
“What—” he pleaded.
The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some hell I hadn’t heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half leveled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the shoreline beside Sutjiadi’s impromptu funeral pyre and picked out motion at the water’s edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured—he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug’s screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.
“Who?” he kept saying. “Who?”
He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.
“Lieutenant Kovacs?” His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. “Who did this?”
“We did,” I told him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.
I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.
Movement from the Chandra.
I whipped about on the bug and saw a polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry ramp and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug’s screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit’s gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was massive.
The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.
“Carrera,” he managed hoarsely. “Forward hatch.”
I was already moving, already knowing bone deep I was too late.
The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three meters from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.
Fuck you, Isaac, fuck you for a die-hard motherfucker.
I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. The locker room was as I’d left it. The female noncom’s corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.
I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.
Fuck.
Well, it figures. I shut down the shower system absently. What did you expect, that he’d be easy to kill?
I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.
• • •
Deprez died while I was gone.
When I got back to him, he’d given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood—at close range, a Sunjet cauterizes totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had gotten him point-blank.
Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were kneeling in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in passing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.
“Tanya.”
She heard it in my voice. “What now?”
“It’s a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?”
“Right.” She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. “There’s a shutdown procedure that doesn’t require encoding, yes. How did you know?”
I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn’t usually work this way. “Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterward.”
Her voice lowered. “Yes.”
“This shutdown. How long will it take?”
“I— Fuck, Kovacs. I don’t know. A couple of hours. Why?”
“Carrera isn’t dead.”
She coughed up a fractured laugh. “What?”
“You see that big fucking hole in Luc.” The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. “Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy, and is by now on the other side of the fucking gate. That clear enough for you?”
“Then why don’t you leave him there?”
“Because if I do—” I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the ’meth surge. “If I do, he’ll swim up while you’re trying to close the gate and he’ll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead. Very shortly.”
“Then why don’t we just get the fuck out of here right now?” asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the Angin Chandra’s Virtue. “In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. Fuck it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months.”
I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.
“No. We have to close the gate.”
Vongsavath threw up her hands. “What the fuck for? Who care—”
“Stow it, Ameli.” I flexed the suit upright again. “Tell the truth, I don’t think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I’m afraid we’re
going to have to do this the hard way.”
And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.
I wasn’t sure if that was the ’meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whiskey on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn’t seem to matter that much.
Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.
“You going on the bug?” she asked. “Or do you want an impeller frame?”
“We’ll need both.”
“Yeah?” She looked suddenly interested. “How come? Do you want me—”
“The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty-kiloton yield. I’m going to fire that motherfucker across and see if we can’t fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won’t. He’ll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I’ll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that”—I shrugged—“it’s a fair fight.”
“And I suppose I’m not—”
“Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?”
“Around here?” She looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. “It feels out of place.”
CHAPTER FORTY–ONE
“You can’t do this,” Wardani said quietly.
I finished angling the nose of the bug upward toward the center of the gate space and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.
“Tanya, we’ve seen this thing withstand weapons that . . .” I searched for adequate words. “That I for one don’t understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean you. Look at you.”
I looked down at the controls on the firing board. “I’m good for a couple more days.”
“Yeah—in a hospital bed. Do you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you’re in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.”
“Rubbish. You’re forgetting the tetrameth.”
“Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?”
“Long enough.” I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. “What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?”
“Kovacs.” She waited until I looked at her. “Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I’ll get the gate closed.”
“Tanya, why didn’t you shoot me with the stunner?”
Silence.
“Tanya?”
“All right,” she said violently. “Piss your fucking life away out there. See if I care.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you.”
“I—” She dropped her gaze. “I panicked.”
“That, Tanya, is bullshit. I’ve seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn’t been any of them. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”
“Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?”
“Well enough.”
She snorted. “Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge people?”
“People like Schneider, you mean?” I shrugged. “He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don’t you? He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.”
“Oh, you’re feeling proud of yourself, is that it?” She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up toward us. “Think you’ve achieved something here, do you?”
“You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?”
“No!”
“It’s not a problem, Tanya.” I shrugged again. “The only thing I can’t work out is why I didn’t die. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I—I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.”
“Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn’t. That, and why I woke up so fast.”
“Maybe,” she said, not looking at me, “you don’t have whatever is inside the rest of us.”
“Hoy, Kovacs.”
We both shifted to look down the beach again.
“Kovacs. Look what I found.”
It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.
“I don’t fucking believe it.”
“Who is it?”
I rustled up a dry chuckle. “Survivor type. Look.”
Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we’d met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits, and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognized me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of meters away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.
“Knew it!” He cackled out loud. “Knew you’d do it. Got files on you, I knew you would. I heard you. Heard you, but I didn’t say.”
“Found him in the armory crawl space,” said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. “Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.”
“Heard you, saw you,” said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. “Got files on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs. Knew you’d do it.”
“Did you,” I said somberly.
“Heard you, saw you, but I didn’t say.”
“Yeah, well, that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It’s in the directives.” I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five meters behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.
“Knew you’d do it,” he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.
“Did you get the impeller?” I asked Vongsavath.
• • •
I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren’t shielded and I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.
Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes: It wouldn’t permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.
Then why are you sitting here, Tak?
Suit’ll soak it up.
But it was a little more than that. Sitting astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn’t that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.
Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the ’meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to—
Or maybe you’re just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the Mivtsemdi all over again.
Shall we just get on with it?
The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow
enough to be visible, breached the gate space with a faint sucking sound, and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn’t think it worth mentioning.
Nice to be right, huh?
Not that it matters much now anyway.
I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and plowed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.
“Two hours, you said, Tanya.”
She ignored me. She hadn’t spoken since I shot Lamont.
“Well.” I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. “Whatever you’ve got to do, start doing it now.”
“What if you’re not back in time?” objected Vongsavath.
I grinned. “Don’t be stupid. If I can’t waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I’m not coming back. You know that.”
Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.
Through the gate. Look—easy as falling.
My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.
Here we fucking go again.
Carrera made his play.
Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened, and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems flickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defenses the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinseled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.
By then, I was too busy to watch.
I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.