“Alri . . . vacs.” Carrera’s voice, trampled out by the interference from the interior structure. “If . . . tha . . . ay . . . ant it.”
He was coming in after me.
The Sunjet stuck.
Leave it!
And fight him with a pistol? In polalloy?
Weapons are an extension, screamed an exasperated Virginia Vidaura, in my head. You are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. Leave it!
’Kay, Virginia. I sniggered a little. Whatever you say.
I lurched away toward the lintel-braced exit from the bay, drawing the interface pistol from its pouch. Wedge equipment was crated and stacked across the bay. The locater beacon, dumped unceremoniously, still powered at standby, the way Carrera had presumably dumped it. A nearby crate cracked open, sections of a disassembled Philips launcher protruding. Haste written into the details of the scene, but it was a soldierly haste. Controlled speed. Combat competence, a man at his trade. Carrera was in his element.
Get the fuck out of here, Tak.
Into the next chamber. Martian machines stirred, bristled, and then sloped sullenly away from me, muttering to themselves. I limped past them, following the painted arrows. No, don’t fucking follow the arrows. I ducked left at the next opportunity and plunged along a corridor the expedition had not taken before. A machine snuffled after me a few paces, then went back.
I thought I heard the sound of motion behind and above me. A jerked glance up into the shadowed space overhead. Ludicrous.
Get a grip, Tak. It’s the ’meth. You did too much and now you’re hallucinating.
More chambers, intersecting curves one into another and always the space above. I stopped myself rigidly from looking up. The pain from the grenade shards in my leg and shoulder was beginning to seep up through the chemical armor of the tetrameth, waking echoes in my ruined left hand and the shattered joint in my right elbow. The furious energy I’d felt earlier had decayed to a jumpy sense of speed and vibrating riffs of inexplicable amusement that threatened to emerge as giggling.
In that state, I backed through into a tight, closed chamber, turned about, and came face-to-face with my last Martian.
This time, the mummified wing membranes were folded down around the skeletal frame, and the whole thing was crouched on a low roost bar. The long skull drooped forward over the chest, hiding the light gland. The eyes were closed.
It lifted its beak and looked up at me.
No. It fucking didn’t.
I shook my head, crept closer to the corpse, and stared at it. From somewhere, an impulse arose to caress the long bone ridge on the back of the skull.
“I’ll just sit here for a while,” I promised, stifling another giggle. “Quietly. Just a couple of hours, that’s all I need.”
I lowered myself to the floor on my uninjured arm, leaned against the sloping wall behind us, clutching the interface gun like a charm. My body was a warm twisting together of limp ropes inside the cage of the mob suit, a faintly quivering assemblage of soft tissue with no more will to animate its exoskeleton. My gaze slipped up into the gloomy space at the top of the chamber and for a while I thought I saw pale wings beating there, trying to escape the imprisoning curve. At some point, though, I spotted the fact that they were in my head, because I could feel their paper-thin texture brushing around the inner surface of my skull, scraping minutely but painfully at the insides of my eyeballs and obscuring my vision by degrees, pale to dark, pale to dark, pale to dark, to dark, to dark—
And a thin, rising whine like grief.
• • •
“Wake up, Kovacs.”
The voice was gentle, and there was something nudging at my hand. My eyes seemed to be gummed shut. I lifted one arm, and my hand bumped off the smooth curve of the faceplate.
“Wake up.” Less gentle now. A tiny jag of adrenaline went eeling along my nerves at the change in tone. I blinked hard and focused. The Martian was still there—no shit, Tak—but my view of the corpse was blocked by the figure in the polalloy suit that stood a safe three or four meters out of reach, Sunjet carried at a wary angle.
The nudging at my hand recommenced. I tipped the helmet and looked down. One of the Martian machines was stroking at my glove with an array of delicate-looking receptors. I shoved it away, and it backed up chittering a couple of places, then came sniffing back undeterred.
Carrera laughed. It rang too loud in the helmet receiver. I felt as if the fluttering wings had somehow hollowed out my head so that my whole skull wasn’t much less delicate than the mummified remains I was sharing the chamber with.
“That’s right. Fucking thing led me to you, can you believe that? Really helpful little beastie.”
At that point, I laughed, too. It seemed the only thing appropriate to the moment. The Wedge commander joined in. He held up the interface gun in his left hand and laughed louder.
“Were you going to kill me with this?”
“Doubt it.”
We both stopped laughing. His faceplate hinged up and he looked down at me out of a face gone slightly haggard around the eyes. I guessed even the short time he’d spent tracking me through the Martian architecture hadn’t been a lot of fun.
I flexed my palm, once, on the off chance that Loemanako’s gun might not have been personally coded, that any Wedge palm plate might be able to call it. Carrera caught the move and shook his head. He tossed the weapon into my lap.
“Unloaded anyway. Hold on to it if you like—some men go better that way, holding a gun tight. Seems to help at the end. Substitute for something, I guess. Mother’s hand. Your dick. You want to stand up to die?”
“No,” I said softly.
“Open your helmet?”
“What for?”
“Just giving you the option.”
“Isaac—” I cleared my throat of what felt like a web of rusted wire. Words scraped through. It seemed suddenly very important to say them. “Isaac, I’m sorry.”
You will be.
It flared through me like tears up behind my eyes. Like the wolf weeping loss that Loemanako’s and Kwok’s deaths had brought up through my throat.
“Good,” he said simply. “But a little late.”
“Have you seen what’s behind you, Isaac?”
“Yeah. Impressive, but very dead. No ghosts that I’ve seen.” He waited. “Do you have anything else to say.”
I shook my head. He raised the Sunjet.
“This is for my murdered men,” he said.
“Look at the fucking thing,” I screamed, every increment of Envoy intonation pushed into it, and for just a fraction of a second his head shifted. I came up off the floor, flexing in the mob suit, hurling the interface gun into the space below his hinged-up faceplate, and diving at him low.
Miserly shavings of luck, a tetrameth crash, and my fading grip on Envoy combat poise. It was all I had left and I took it all across the space between us, teeth bared. When the Sunjet crackled, it hit where I’d been. Maybe it was the shouted distraction, shifting his focus, maybe the gun hurtling toward his face, maybe just this same tired general sense that it was all over.
He staggered backward as I hit him, and I trapped the Sunjet between our bodies. He slid into a combat judo block that would have thrown an unarmored man off his hip. I hung on with the stolen strength of Loemanako’s suit. Another two stumbling backsteps and we both smashed into the mummified Martian corpse together. The frame tipped and collapsed. We tumbled over it like clowns, staggering to get up as we slipped. The corpse disintegrated. Powder burst of pale orange in the air around us.
I’m sorry.
You will be, if the skin crumbles.
Faceplate up, panting, Carrera must have sucked in a lungful of the stuff. More settled on his eyes and the exposed skin of his face.
The first yell as he felt it eating in.
Then the screams.
He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his
face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.
He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.
I’m sorry.
I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FORTY–TWO
When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.
“That’s wonderful,” he breathed. “The stuff of epics.”
“Stop that,” I told him.
“No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.”
“Well.” I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. “You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee Group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the fucking thing.”
“You may laugh.” There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. “But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?”
I poured my glass half full of whiskey again. “Kemp manages.”
“Oh, that’s politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neo-Quellist sentiment and old-time Commin, Commu—” He snapped his fingers. “Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?”
“Communitarianism.”
“Yes, that.” He shook his head sagely. “That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savor? Where’s the blood and adrenaline?”
I sipped the whiskey and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumor, half jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly tuned screens, said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.
Pity they didn’t have Carrera around anymore, to do their thinking for them.
I shivered a little as the whiskey went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.
“Plenty of blood out there at the moment,” I observed.
“Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterward. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.”
“Thought you would.”
“In less than a year he’d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn’t, his own people would, uh, vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to go quietly.”
“Yes, that’s the problem with voting,” Roespinoedji said judiciously. “Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?”
“Kemp? Yeah, a few times.”
“And what was he like?”
He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same goddamned fucking conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.
“Tall,” I said. “He was tall.”
“Ah. Well, yes, he would be.”
I turned to look at the boy beside me. “Doesn’t it worry you, Djoko? What’s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?”
He grinned. “I doubt their political assessors are any different from the Cartel’s. Everyone has appetites. And besides. With what you’ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul.” His look sharpened. “Allowing that we have dismantled all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is.”
“Relax. I told you, I only set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it’d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for.”
“Hmm.” Roespinoedji rolled whiskey around in the base of his glass. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. “Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?”
I shrugged. “What if? Hand could never risk assuming he’d found all of them: too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff.”
“Yes. Well, you’re the Envoy.” He prodded at the slim hand-size slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. “And you’re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognize this broadcast?”
“Trust me.” Just the words brought a grin to my lips. “State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission’s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition.”
Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. “All right. Enough. We’ve got an agreement. Don’t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling.”
“You’d just better not be fucking with me,” I said amiably.
“I’m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy.” He sniffed. “In Landfall, at any rate.”
“And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek.”
“That’s a strange attitude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world.”
“Figure of speech. A good technician. Don’t go cutting corners on me.”
“Well, if you don’t trust me,” he said huffily, “why don’t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you.”
“She’ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a fuckup.”
“I’m sure she does. She seems very competent.”
I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every maneuver, and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.
“Yes. She is.”
“You know”—Roespinoedji chuckled—“last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked.”
I shivered again. “Yeah. Wasn’t easy.”
We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji’s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like wood smoke from someone else’s beach barbecue.
“Did you give it a name?” Roespinoedji wondered finally. “This starship.”
“No, there wasn’t really that kind of time.”
“So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?”
I shrugged.
“The Wardani?”
“Ah.”
He looked at me shrewdly. “And would she like that?”
I picked up my glass and drained it.
“How the fuck would I know?”
• • •
She’d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knockoff, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji’s place, she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out.
I didn’t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it anymore—and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.
Roespinoedji was sold.
The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hung over with the whiskey and Roespinoedji’s powerful black-market antirad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick, and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instill fear. Their demeanor never made it out of What’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon, where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.
“It’s cool,” she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. “Why don’t you go talk to Tanya. I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.”
“To me?”
The pilot shrugged impatiently. “To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.”