The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly what?’

  Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.

  ‘Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.’

  ‘I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.’

  He shrugged. ‘Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?’

  I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. ‘Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—’

  ‘Politics.’ Schneider waved a hand dismissively. ‘This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of their annual profits to own.’

  I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical attention that - at a pro-government estimate - half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.

  I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘You’re in?’

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said mildly. ‘Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.’

  Schneider sucked in his cheeks. ‘I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, lieutenant. I need—’

  ‘You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?’

  There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.’

  ‘Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.’

  I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.

  But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn’t show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.

  ‘The Es, huh? When did you serve?’

  ‘A while ago. Why?’

  ‘You at Innenin?’

  His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I was falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.

  I closed my eyes briefly.

  ‘Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?’

  Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.

  ‘Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?’

  Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.

  It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.

  This success, plus the scattered ruins and artefacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up, designed by the UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilisation is still out there somewhere. My own personal favourite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilisation.

  In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.

  Schneider grinned. ‘You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Yeah, well just hear me out.’ He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. ‘See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us, not like us physically, I mean we assume their civilisation had the same cultural bases as ours.’

  Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.

  ‘That means, we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centres of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light years out from the main Latimer system, that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins, but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re doing and comes rushing across.’

  ‘I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.’

  At sub-light speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.

  ‘Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?’

  I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.

  ‘So then,’ he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, ‘you get the
archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first come, first served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.’

  ‘For a percentage.’

  ‘Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist. ’

  He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot’s Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.

  I shrugged. ‘Nice work. And?’

  ‘I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—’

  ‘Scratchers?’

  Schneider blinked. ‘Yeah. What about it?’

  ‘This isn’t my planet,’ I said patiently, ‘I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?’

  ‘Oh. You know, kids.’ He gestured, perplexed. ‘Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.’

  ‘Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?’

  ‘What?’ he blinked again.

  ‘Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?’

  Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.

  ‘They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.’

  ‘Or turn up too late to get a better stake.’

  ‘Yeah.’ For some reason he didn’t like that crack either. ‘Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something.’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘A Martian starship.’ Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Intact.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  I sighed again. ‘You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn’t got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?’

  Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

  ‘I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.’

  ‘A gate?’ Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. ‘You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?’

  ‘Kovacs, it’s a gate.’ Schneider spoke as if to a small child. ‘We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.’

  ‘Into the ship?’ Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.’

  ‘Or a shuttle.’ I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. ‘What were you flying?’

  He grimaced. ‘Piece of shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.’

  ‘What?’ I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. ‘Wouldn’t fit?’

  ‘Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,’ said Schneider morosely. ‘Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole programme.’

  ‘No one had a spacesuit?’

  ‘What for?’ Schneider spread his hands. ‘It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ’cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?’

  ‘Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?’

  ‘Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?’

  I shrugged. ‘Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.’

  Schneider skinned me a tight grin. ‘You don’t think we could have handled selling to the corporates?’

  ‘I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on who you were dealing with.’

  ‘So who would you have gone to?’

  I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. ‘That’s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well.’ I offered him a small smile of my own. ‘I’m still listening. What happened next?’

  Schneider’s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.

  ‘What happened?’ He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans’ gazes were snagged back to the performance. ‘What happened? This war is what fucking happened.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Somewhere, a baby was crying.

  For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I’d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren’t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.

  ‘Hot here.’

  Schneider had shut down the shuttle’s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer wafted to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle’s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.

  A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.

  ‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said briskly. ‘This is Corporal Schneider. We’re here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation.’

  The sergeant frowned. ‘I wasn’t informed of this.’

  ‘I’m informing you now, sergeant.’

  In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely k
nown on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate’s unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came to tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant’s throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and women starving in their bubblefabs.

  ‘I’ll have to see some authorisation.’

  I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain. In a planet-wide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers latitudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one had even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I’d had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about south-east of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.

  ‘Will that be sufficient, sergeant?’

  He pored over the printout, as if he was hoping the authorisation flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience which was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby’s crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of here.

  The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. ‘You’ll have to see the commandant,’ he said woodenly. ‘These people are all under government supervision.’

  I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.

  ‘Right.’ I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. ‘Let’s go talk to the commandant then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won’t take long.’

  The commandant’s office was in a double-storey ’fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early millennium gargoyles and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the ’fab and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.