Not yet.
The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn’t have one of those at hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug’s drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line, and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera’s next move.
Come on, you motherfucker.
Ah-ah. You’re expecting, Tak.
We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.
Thanks, Virginia.
Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn’t have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn’t suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.
I hadn’t had time to find and install the Wedge’s battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn’t, either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako’s team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched—there wouldn’t be much.
You hope.
The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favor. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.
There.
Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.
I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point, and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera’s missile homing in on the bug.
I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward toward the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn’t see me, and by the time he could . . .
Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.
Not yet. Not—
Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometer now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he’d have to deal with, and while he was doing that I’d get close.
I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.
Space erupted in light around me.
For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.
Flare. You stupid fuck, he’s lit you up.
I snapped on the impellers and whirled away sideways. Sunjet fire chased me from a rampart on the hull over my head. On one spin, I managed to get off returning fire. Three sputtering seconds, but Carrera’s beam shut off. I fled for the roof, got some piece of hull architecture between me and Carrera’s position, then reversed the impeller drive and braked to slow drift. Blood hammered in my temples.
Did I get him?
Proximity to the hull forced recoding of my surroundings. The alien-sculpted architecture of the vessel overhead was suddenly the surface of a planetoid and I was head-down five meters over it. The flare burned steadily a hundred meters out, casting twisted shadows past the chunk of hull architecture I was floating behind. Weird detail scarred the surfaces around me, curls and scrapings of structure like scrawlings in bas-relief, glyphs on a monumental scale.
Did I—
“Nice evasion, Kovacs.” Carrera’s voice spoke into my ear as if he were sitting in the helmet beside me. “Not bad for a nonswimmer.”
I checked the heads-up displays. The suit radio was set for receive only. I nudged sideways in the helmet space and the transmit symbol glowed on. A cautious body flex put me parallel to the hull. Meanwhile . . .
Keep him talking.
“Who told you I was a nonswimmer?”
“Oh, yes, I was forgetting. That fiasco with Randall. But a couple of outings like that hardly make you a VacCom veteran.” He was playing for avuncular amusement, but there wasn’t much hiding the raw ugliness of the rage underneath it. “Which fact explains why it’s going to be very easy for me to kill you. That is what I’m going to do, Kovacs. I’m going to smash in your faceplate and watch your face boil out.”
“Better get on with it, then.” I scanned the solidified bubbling of hull in front of me, looking for a sniper vantage point. “Because I don’t plan to be here much longer.”
“Only came back for the view, huh. Or did you leave some holoporn with sentimental value lying around the docking bay?”
“Just keeping you out of the way while Wardani closes the gate, that’s all.”
A short pause, in which I could hear him breathing. I shortened the tether line on the Sunjet until it floated close beside my right arm, then touched the trim controls on the impeller arm and risked a half-second impulse. The straps tugged as the racked motors on my back lifted me delicately up and forward.
“What’s the matter, Isaac? You sulking?”
He made a noise in his throat. “You’re a piece of shit, Kovacs. You’ve sold out your comrades like a Tower-dweller. Murdered them for credit.”
“I thought that’s what we were about, Isaac. Murder for credit.”
“Don’t give me your fucking Quellisms, Kovacs. Not with a hundred Wedge personnel dead and blown apart back there. Not with the blood of Tony Loemanako and Kwok Yuen Yee on your hands. You are the murderer. They were soldiers.”
A tiny stinging in my throat and eyes at the names.
Lock it down.
“They slaughtered sort of easily for soldiers.”
“Fuck you, Kovacs.”
“Whatever.” I reached out for the approaching curve of the hull architecture where a small bubble formed a rounded spur on one side of the main structure. Behind my outstretched arms, the rest of my body shifted into a dead-stop posture. A momentary sense of panic sweated through me at the sudden thought that the hull might be contact-mined in some way—
Oh well. Can’t think of everything.
—and then my gloved hands came to rest on the curving surface and I stopped moving. The Sunjet bumped gently off my shoulder. I risked a rapid glance through the gull-winged space where the two bubble forms intersected. Ducked back. Envoy recall built me a picture and mapped it against memory.
It was the docking bay, centered at the bottom of the same three-hundred-meter dimple and set about with bubbled hillocks that were themselves distorted by other, smaller swellings rising haphazardly from their flanks. Loemanako’s squad must have left a locater beacon, because there was no other way Carrera could have found the place this fast on a hull nearly thirty klicks across and sixty long. I looked at the suit receiver display again, but the only channel showi
ng was the one Carrera’s slightly hoarse breathing came through on. No big surprise; he would have killed the broadcast as soon as he got set up. No point in telegraphing his ambush point to anyone else.
So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.
I eased myself painstakingly back to a viewing position and started scanning the globular landscape below me a degree at a time. All I needed was a single careless move. Just one.
From Isaac Carrera, decorated VacCom commander, survivor of half a thousand vacuum combat engagements and victor in most. A careless move. Sure, Tak. Coming right up.
“You know, I wonder, Kovacs.” His voice was calm again. He’d cranked his anger back under control. Under the circumstances, the last thing I needed. “What kind of deal did Hand offer you?”
Scan, search. Keep him talking.
“More than you’re paying me, Isaac.”
“I think you’re forgetting our rather excellent health care coverage.”
“Nope. Just trying to avoid needing it again.”
Scan, search.
“Was it so bad, fighting for the Wedge? You were guaranteed resleeving at all times, and it’s not as if a man of your training was ever likely to suffer real death.”
“Three of my team would have to disagree with you there, Isaac. If they weren’t already really fucking dead, that is.”
A slight hesitation. “Your team?”
I grimaced. “Jiang Jianping got turned into soup by an ultravibe blast, the nanobes took Hansen and Cruicksha—”
“Your tea—”
“I heard what you fucking said the first time, Isaac.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I merely wonder—”
“Training’s got fucking nothing to do with it, and you know it. You can go sell that fucking song to Lapinee. Machines and luck, that’s what kills you or keeps you alive on Sanction Four.”
Scan, search, find that motherfucker.
And calm down.
“Sanction Four and any other conflict,” Carrera said quietly. “You of all people should know that. It’s the nature of the game. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have dealt yourself in. The Wedge isn’t a conscript army.”
“Isaac, the whole fucking planet has been conscripted into this war. No one’s got any choice anymore. You’re going to be involved, you might as well have the big guns. That’s a Quellism for you, in case you wondered.”
He grunted. “Sounds like common sense to me. Didn’t that bitch ever say anything original.”
There. My ’methed-out nerves jumped with it. Right there.
The slim edge of something built by human technology, stark angular outline caught by flarelight among the curves at the base of a bubble outcrop. One side of an impeller set frame. I settled the Sunjet into place and lined up on the target. Drawled response.
“She wasn’t a philosopher, Isaac. She was a soldier.”
“She was a terrorist.”
“We quibble over terms.”
I triggered the Sunjet. Fire lanced across the concave arena and splashed off the outline. Something exploded visibly off the hull, in fragments. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.
Breathing.
It was the only thing that warned me. The papery whisper of breath at the bottom of the suit receiver. The suppressed sound of effort.
Fu—
Something invisible shattered and shed light over my head. Something no more visible spanged off my faceplate, leaving a tiny glowing V of chipped glass. I felt other tiny impacts off my suit.
Grenade!
Instinct had me already spinning to the right. Later, I realized why. It was the quickest route between Carrera’s position and mine, working around the rim of hull architecture that ringed the docking bay. A single third of the circle, and Carrera had crept around it while he talked to me. Shed of the impellers that had decoyed me and would in any case telltale his movement, he’d dragged and shoved himself from handhold to boot purchase point, all the way around. He’d used anger to disguise the stress in his voice as he worked, held down his breathing elsewhere, and at some point he judged close enough, he’d lain still and waited for me to give myself away with the Sunjet. And with the experience of decades in vacuum combat, he’d hit me with the one weapon that wouldn’t show up.
Exemplary, really.
He came at me across fifty meters of space like a flying version of Semetaire on the beach, arms reaching. The Sunjet sprouted recognizably from his right fist, a Philips squeeze launcher from his left. Though there was no way to detect it, I knew the second electromag-accelerated grenade was already in flight between us.
I jammed the impellers to life and backflipped. The hull vanished from view, then hinged back in from the top as I spiraled away. The grenade, deflected by the wash from the impeller drives as I flipped, exploded and sewed space with shrapnel. I felt shards of the stuff bang through one leg and foot, sudden numbing impacts and then traceries of pain through the flesh like biofilaments slicing. My ears popped painfully as suit pressure dropped. The polalloy socked inward at a dozen other points, but it held.
I tumbled up and over the bubble outcrop, a sprawling target in the flarelight, hull and bearings spinning around me. The pain in my ears eased as the polalloy congealed across the damage. No time to look for Carrera. I trimmed the impeller thrust, then dived once more for the globular landscape stretching below me. Sunjet fire flashed around me.
I hit the hull a glancing blow, used the impact to change trajectories, and saw another Sunjet blast scythe past on the left. I caught a glimpse of Carrera as he adhered briefly to a rounded surface back up the slope of the dimple. I already knew the next move. From there, he’d push off with a single well-controlled kick and ride the simple linear velocity down toward me, firing as he came. At some point he’d get close enough to punch molten holes through the suit that the polalloy could not congeal over.
I bounced off another bubble. More idiot tumbling. More near-miss Sunjet fire. I trimmed the impellers again, tried for a line that would take me into the shadow of the outcrop, and cut off the thrust. My hands groped after something to hold and caught on one of the bas-relief scroll effects I’d spotted earlier. I killed my motion and twisted around to look for Carrera.
No sign. I was out of line-of-sight.
I turned back and crept gratefully farther around the bubble outcrop. Another curl of bas-relief offered itself and I reached down—
Oh, shit.
I was holding the wing of a Martian.
Shock held me unstirring for a second. Time enough for me to think this was some kind of carving in the hull surface, time enough to know at some deep level that it wasn’t.
The Martian had died screaming. The wings were flung back, sunk into the hull surface for most of their width, protruding only at the curled extremities and where their muscled webbing rose up under the arched spine of the creature. The head was twisted in agony, beak gaping open, eyes glaring like comet-tailed orbs of washed jet. One clawed limb lifted talons above the hull surface. The whole corpse was sheathed in the material of the hull it had flailed against, drowning there.
I shifted my gaze and looked out across the surface ahead of me, the scattered scrawl of raised detail, and knew finally what I was looking at. The hull around the docking bay dimple—all of it, the whole bubbling expanse—was a mass grave, a spider’s web trap for thousands upon thousands of Martians who had all died entombed in whatever substances had run and foamed and burst here when—
When what?
The shape of the catastrophe was outside anything I could envisage. I could not imagine the weapons that would do this, the circumstances of this conflict between two civilizations as far ahead of humanity’s scavenger-built little empire as we were from the gulls whose bodies had clogged the water around Sauberville. I could not see how it could happen. I could only see the results. I could only see the dead.
Nothi
ng ever changes. A hundred and fifty light-years from home and the same shit just keeps going down.
Got to be some kind of universal fucking constant.
The grenade bounced off another hull-drowned Martian ten meters away, careened up, and exploded. I rolled away from the blast. A brief pummeling over my back and one searing penetration under my shoulder. Pressure drop like a knife through my eardrums. I screamed.
Fuck this.
I fired the impellers and burst out of the cover of the bubble outcrop, not knowing what I was going to do until I did it. Carrera’s gliding figure showed up less than fifty meters off. I saw Sunjet fire, turned on my back, and dived directly at the docking bay mouth. Carrera’s voice trailed me, almost amused.
“Where do you think you’re going, Kovacs?”
Something exploded at my back and the impeller thrust cut out. Scorching heat across my back. Carrera and his fucking VacCom skills. But with the residual velocity and, well, maybe a little spirit-realm luck cadged off the vengeful ghost of Hand—he shot you after all, Matt, you did curse the fucker—just to grease the palm of whatever fate . . .
I plowed through the atmosphere baffles of the docking bay at a slewed angle, found gravity beneath me and battered into one of the stacked fat-snake containing walls, bounced off with the sudden shock of weight from the grav field, and crashed to the deck, trailing wings of smoke and flame from the wrecked impeller frame.
For a long moment, I lay still in the cavernous quiet of the bay.
Then, from somewhere, I heard a curious bubbling sound in my helmet. It took me several seconds to realize I was laughing.
Get up, Takeshi.
Oh, come on . . .
He can kill you just as dead in here, Tak. Get up.
I reached out and tried to prop myself up. Wrong arm—the broken elbow joint bent soggily inside the mob suit. Pain ran up and down the abused muscles and tendons. I rolled away, gasping, and tried with the other arm. Better. The mob suit wheezed a little, something definitely awry in the works here, but it got me up. Now get rid of the wreckage on my back. The emergency release still worked, sort of. I hauled myself clear; the Sunjet caught in the frame and would not tug loose on the tether line. I yanked at it for a senseless moment, then unseamed the tether instead and bent to free the weapon from the other side.