Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a moulded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways slumped figure behind the desk.
‘Commandant?’
The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.
‘What is it, sergeant?’
The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armour but wasn’t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was made of lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist and forearm section was set with a half dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.
I stood in front of the desk and saluted.
‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said softly.
‘Well.’ The commandant struggled upright in his chair. ‘Perhaps you’d like more light in here, lieutenant. I like the dark, but then,’ he chuckled behind closed lips. ‘I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.’
He groped across the keyboard and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.
‘Is that better?’ The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. ‘I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.’ The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. ‘A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?’
My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.
‘I’d like to have your full attention, commandant.’
For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical, to look at the jacked-in cable.
‘Oh,’ he whispered. ‘This.’
Abruptly, he lurched round to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.
‘Get out.’
The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them gently pulling the door shut behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.
‘Down to a trickle, I assure you,’ he said, gesturing at the still winking light. ‘Probably couldn’t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.’ He made an obvious effort. ‘So what, may I ask, do Carrera’s Wedge want with me? We’ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I’m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.’ Another gesture, this time turned outwards to the bank of monitors. ‘The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I’ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn’t very far along yet—’
‘I haven’t come for your supplies, commandant.’
‘Ah, then it’s a reckoning, is it? Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel’s scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?’ The idea seemed to amuse him. ‘Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?’
I shook my head.
‘I’m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.’
‘Ah yes, the archaeologue.’
A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorisation on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.
‘Some problem, commandant?’ I asked quietly.
He lowered the arm and leant on his elbow, wagging the authorisation to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.
‘What do you want her for?’ he asked, equally softly. ‘Little Tanya the Scratcher. What’s she to the Wedge?’
I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn’t be difficult to do, I’d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months, but there was the sergeant outside the door and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn’t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.
‘That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?’
But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.
Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.
Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.
For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.
‘Sergeant,’ he bellowed hoarsely.
The door opened.
‘Sergeant, get Wardani out of ’fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant’s shuttle.’
The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.
‘Thank you, commandant.’ I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.
‘Popular woman,’ he said.
I looked back. ‘What?’
‘Wardani.’ He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. ‘You’re not the first.’
‘Not the first what?’
‘Less than three months ago.’ As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. ‘We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they’re in, in these parts.’ His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. ‘Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.’
I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant’s desk and crad
led his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon bumping the roof of a room where the party has long since burnt itself out.
‘Lieutenant?’
The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.
‘Lieutenant?’
‘Coming.’ I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.
Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.
‘Problem?’
‘No. Get rid of these kids.’
Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child’s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.
‘You’re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren’t all bad,’ I said quietly.
Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. ‘That’s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show’s over.’
The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.
‘Where’d you get those things?’
‘Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn’t have much use for them.’
‘No, they’ve already shot all the refugees down there.’ I nodded at the departing children, now chattering excitedly over their new acquisitions. ‘The camp militia’ll probably confiscate the lot once we’re gone.’
Schneider shrugged. ‘I know. But I’d already given out the chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?’
It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring out the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.
‘Here she comes,’ said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.
Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgement.
She swayed, stumbled and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.
‘Tanya Wardani,’ said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar code strips and a scanner. ‘I’ll need your ID for the release.’
I cocked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impassively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.
‘Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, what is it?’ Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.
‘Will she be coming back?’
I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.
‘No, sergeant,’ I said, as if to a small child. ‘She won’t be coming back. She’s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her.’
I closed the hatch.
But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.
He didn’t even bother to shield his face from the dust.
CHAPTER FOUR
We flew west from the camp on grav effect, over a mixture of desert scrub and blots of darker vegetation where the planet’s flora had managed to get a lock on shallow-running aquifers. About twenty minutes later we picked up the coast and headed out to sea over waters that Wedge military intelligence said were infested with Kempist smart mines. Schneider kept our speed down, subsonic the whole time. Easy to track.
I spent the early part of the flight in the main cabin, ostensibly going through a current affairs datastack that the shuttle was pulling down from one of Carrera’s command satellites, but in reality watching Tanya Wardani with an Envoy-tuned eye. She sat slumped in the seat furthest from the hatch and hence closest to the right side viewports, forehead resting against the glass. Her eyes were open, but whether she was focusing on the ground below was hard to tell. I didn’t try to speak to her - I’d seen the same mask on a thousand other faces this year, and I knew she wasn’t coming out from behind it until she was ready, which might be never. Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. Lately, they’ve been calling it War Shock Syndrome, an all-encompassing term which bleakly but rather neatly puts the writing on the wall for those who would like to treat it. There may be a plethora of more and less effective psychological techniques for repair, but the ultimate aim of any medical philosophy, that of prevention rather than cure, is in this case clearly beyond the wit of humanity to implement.
To me it comes as no surprise that we’re still flailing around with Neanderthal spanners in the elegant wreckage of Martian civilisation without really having a clue how all that ancient culture used to operate. After all, you wouldn’t expect a butcher of farm livestock to understand or be able to take over from a team of neurosurgeons. There’s no telling how much irreparable damage we may have already caused to the body of knowledge and technology the Martians have unwisely left lying around for us to discover. In the end, we’re not much more than a pack of jackals, nosing through the broken bodies and wreckage of a plane crash.
‘Coming up on the coast,’ Schneider’s voice said over the intercom. ‘You want to get up here?’
I lifted my face away from the holographic data display, flattened the data motes to the base and looked across at Wardani. She had shifted her head slightly at the sound of Schneider’s voice, but the eyes that found the speaker set in the roof were still dulled with emotional shielding. It hadn’t taken me very long to extract from Schneider the previous circumstances of his relationship with this woman, but I still wasn’t sure how that would affect things now. On his own admission it had been a limited thing, abruptly terminated by the outbreak of war almost two years ago and there was no reason to suppose it could cause problems. My own worst-case scenario was that the whole starship story was an elaborate con on Schneider’s part for no other purpose than to secure the archaeologue’s release and get the two of them offworld. There had been a previous attempt to liberate Wardan
i, if the camp commandant was to be believed, and part of me wondered if those mysteriously well equipped commandos hadn’t been Schneider’s last set of dupes in the bid to reunite him with his partner. If that turned out to be the case, I was going to be angry.
Inside me, at the level where it really mattered, I didn’t give the idea much credence; too many details had checked out in the time since we’d left the hospital. Dates and names were correct - there had been an archaeological dig on the coast north-west of Sauberville, and Tanya Wardani was registered as site regulator. The haulage liaison was listed as Guild Pilot Ian Mendel, but it was Schneider’s face, and the hardware manifest began with the serial number and flight records of a cumbersome Mowai Ten Series suborbital. Even if Schneider had tried to get Wardani out before, it was for far more material reasons than simple affection.
And if he hadn’t, then somewhere along the line someone else had been dealt into this game.
Whatever happened, Schneider would bear watching.
I closed down the data display and got up, just as the shuttle banked seaward. Steadying myself with a hand on the overhead lockers, I looked down at the archaeologue.
‘I’d fasten your seatbelt if I were you. The next few minutes are likely to be a little rough.’
She made no response, but her hands moved in her lap. I made my way forward to the cockpit.
Schneider looked up as I entered, hands easy on the arms of the manual flight chair. He nodded at a digital display which he’d maximised near the top of the instrument projection space.
The Complete SF Collection Page 53