The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  You get places like Dig 27.

  Hardly the most imaginative name for a town, but there was a certain amount of accuracy in the choice. Dig 27 had sprung up around the excavation of the same name, served for fifty years as dormitory, refectory and leisure complex for the archaeologue workforce, and was now in steep decline as the seams of xenoculture ore panned out to the dregs. The original dighead was a gaunt centipedal skeleton, straddling the skyline on stilled retrieval belts and awkwardly bent support struts as we flew in from the east. The town started beneath the drooping tail of the structure and spread from it in sporadic and uncertain clumps like an unenthusiastic concrete fungus. Buildings rarely heaved themselves above five storeys, and many of those that had were rather obviously derelict, as if the effort of upward growth had exhausted them beyond the ability to sustain internal life.

  Schneider banked around the skull end of the stalled dighead, flattened out and floated down towards a piece of wasteground between three listing pylons which presumably delineated Dig 27’s landing field. Dust boiled up from the badly kept ferrocrete as we hovered and I saw jagged cracks blown naked by our landing brakes. Over the comset, a senile navigation beacon husked a request for identification. Schneider ignored it, knocked over the primaries and climbed from his seat with a yawn.

  ‘End of the line, folks. Everybody out.’

  We followed him back to the main cabin and watched while he strapped on one of the unsubtle sawn-off particle throwers we’d liberated with the shuttle. He looked up, caught me watching and winked.

  ‘I thought these were your friends.’ Tanya Wardani was watching as well, alarmed if the expression on her face was anything to go by.

  Schneider shrugged. ‘They were,’ he said. ‘But you can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Oh great.’ She turned to me. ‘Have you got anything a bit less bulky than that cannon that I could maybe borrow. Something I can lift.’

  I lifted the edges of my jacket aside to show the two Wedge-customised Kalashnikov interface guns where they rested in the chest harness.

  ‘I’d lend you one of these, but they’re personally coded.’

  ‘Take a blaster, Tanya,’ said Schneider without looking up from his own preparations. ‘More chance you’ll hit something with it anyway. Slug throwers are for fashion victims.’

  The archaeologue raised her eyebrows. I smiled a little. ‘He’s probably right. Here, you don’t have to wear it around your waist. The straps web out like this. Sling it over your shoulder.’

  I moved to help her fit the weapon and as she turned towards me something indefinable happened in the small space between our bodies. As I settled the holstered weapon at the downward slope of her left breast, her eyes slanted upward to mine. They were, I saw, the colour of jade under swift-flowing water.

  ‘That comfortable?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  I went to move the holster and she raised a hand to stop me. Against the dusty ebony of my arm, her fingers looked like naked bones, skeletal and frail.

  ‘Leave it, it’ll do.’

  ‘OK. Look, you just pull down and the holster lets it go. Push back up and it grips again. Like that.’

  ‘Got it.’

  The exchange had not been lost on Schneider. He cleared his throat loudly and went to crack the hatch. As it hinged outward, he held onto a handgrip at the leading edge and swung down with practised flyer nonchalance. The effect was spoiled slightly as he landed and began coughing in the still settling dust our landing brake had raised. I suppressed a grin.

  Wardani went after him, letting herself down awkwardly with the heels of her palms on the floor of the open hatchway. Mindful of the dust clouds outside, I stayed in the hatchway, eyes narrowed against the airborne grit in an attempt to see if we had a reception committee.

  And we did.

  They emerged from the dust like figures on a frieze gradually sandblasted clean by someone like Tanya Wardani. I counted seven in all, bulky silhouettes swathed in desert gear and spiky with weapons. The central figure looked deformed, taller than the others by half a metre but swollen and misshapen from the chest up. They advanced in silence.

  I folded my arms across my chest so my fingertips touched the butts of the Kalashnikovs.

  ‘Djoko?’ Schneider coughed again. ‘That you, Djoko?’

  More silence. The dust had settled enough for me to make out the dull glint of metal on gun barrels and the enhanced vision masks they all wore. There was room for body armour beneath the loose desert gear.

  ‘Djoko, quit fucking about.’

  A high-pitched, impossible laugh from the towering, misshapen figure in the centre. I blinked.

  ‘Jan, Jan, my good friend.’ It was the voice of a child. ‘Do I make you so nervous?’

  ‘What do you think, fuckwit?’ Schneider stepped forward and as I watched the huge figure spasmed and seemed to break apart. Startled, I cranked up the neurachem vision and made out a small boy of about eight scrambling down from the arms of the man who held him to his chest. As the boy reached the ground and ran to meet Schneider, I saw the man who had carried him straighten up into a peculiar immobility. Something quickened along the tendons in my arms. I screwed up my eyes some more and scanned the now unremarkable figure head to foot. This one was not wearing the EV mask and his face was . . .

  I felt my mouth tighten as I realised what I was looking at.

  Schneider and the boy were trading complicated handshakes and spouting gibberish at each other. Midway through this ritual, the boy broke off and took Tanya Wardani’s hand with a formal bow and some ornate flattery that I didn’t catch. He seemed insistent on clowning his way through the meeting. He was spouting harmless-ness like a tinsel fountain on Harlan’s Day. And with the worst of the dust down where it belonged, the rest of the reception committee had lost the vague menace their silhouettes had given them. The clearing air revealed them as an assortment of nervous-looking and mostly young irregulars. I saw one wispy-bearded Caucasian on the left chewing his lip below the blank calm of the EV mask. Another was shifting from foot to foot. All of them had their weapons slung or stowed and as I jumped down from the hatch, they all flinched backward.

  I raised my hands soothingly shoulder height, palms outward.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise to this idiot.’ Schneider was now trying to cuff the boy around the back of the head, with limited success. ‘Djoko, come here and say hello to a real live Envoy. This is Takeshi Kovacs. He was at Innenin.’

  ‘Indeed?’ The boy came and offered his hand. Dark-skinned and fine-boned, it was already a handsome sleeve - in later life it would be androgynously beautiful. It was dressed immaculately in a tailored mauve sarong and matching quilted jacket. ‘Djoko Roespinoedji, at your service. I apologise for the drama, but one cannot be too careful in these uncertain times. Your call came in on satellite frequencies that no one outside Carrera’s Wedge has access to and Jan, while I love him like a brother, is not known for his connections in high places. It could have been a trap.’

  ‘Mothballed scrambler uplink,’ said Schneider importantly. ‘We stole it from the Wedge. This time, Djoko, when I say I’m jacked in, I mean it.’

  ‘Who might be trying to trap you?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah.’ The boy sighed with a world-weariness several decades out of place in his voice. ‘There is no telling. Government agencies, the Cartel, corporate leverage analysts, Kempist spies. None of them have any reason to love Djoko Roespinoedji. Remaining neutral in a war does not save you from making enemies as it should. Rather, it loses you any friends you might have and earns you suspicion and contempt from all sides.’

  ‘The war isn’t this far south yet,’ Wardani pointed out.

  Djoko Roespinoedji placed a hand gravely on his chest. ‘For which we are all extremely grateful. But these days, not being on the front line merely means you are under occupation of one form or another. Landfall is barely eight hundred kilometres to our west.
We are close enough to be considered a perimeter post, which means a state militia garrison and periodic visits from the Cartel’s political assessors.’ He sighed again. ‘It is all very costly.’

  I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re garrisoned? Where are they?’

  ‘Over there.’ The boy jerked a thumb at the ragged group of irregulars. ‘Oh, there are a few more back at the uplink bunker, as per regulations, but essentially what you see here is the garrison.’

  ‘That’s the state militia?’ asked Tanya Wardani.

  ‘It is.’ Roespinoedji looked sadly at them for a moment, then turned back to us. ‘Of course, when I said it was costly, I was referring mostly to the cost of making the political assessor’s visits congenial. For us and for him, that is. The assessor is not a very sophisticated man, but he does have substantial, um, appetites. And of course ensuring that he remains our political assessor displaces a certain amount of expenditure too. Generally they are rotated every few months.’

  ‘Is he here now?’

  ‘I would hardly have invited you here if he were. He left only last week.’ The boy leered, unnerving to watch on a face that young. ‘Satisfied, you might say, with what he found here.’

  I found myself smiling. I couldn’t help it.

  ‘I think we’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘Well that will depend on what you came for,’ said Roespinoedji, glancing at Schneider. ‘Jan was far from explicit. But come. Even in Dig 27 there are more congenial places than this to discuss business.’

  He led us back to the little group of waiting militiamen and made a sharp clucking sound with his tongue. The figure who had been carrying him before stooped awkwardly and picked him up. Behind me, I heard Tanya Wardani’s breath catch slightly as she saw what had been done to the man.

  It was by no means the worst thing I’d ever seen happen to a human being, wasn’t in fact even the worst I’d seen recently; still there was something eerie about the ruined head and the silvery alloy cement that had been used to patch it together. If I’d had to guess, I would have said this sleeve had been struck by flying shrapnel. Any kind of deliberate, directional weapon just wouldn’t have left anything to work with. But someone somewhere had taken the trouble to repair the dead man’s skull, seal up the remaining gaps with resin and replace the eyeballs with photoreceptors that sat in the gutted sockets like cyclopic silver spiders waiting for prey. Then, presumably, they’d coaxed enough life back into the brain-stem to operate the body’s vegetative systems and basic motor functions, and maybe respond to a few programmed commands.

  Back before I got shot up on the Rim, I’d had a Wedge noncom working with me whose Afro-Caribbean sleeve was actually his own. One night, waiting out a satellite bombardment in the ruins of some kind of temple, he’d told me one of the myths his people, in chains, had taken across an ocean on Earth, and later, in hope of a new beginning, across the gulfs of the Martian astrogation charts to the world that would later become known as Latimer. It was a story of magicians and the slaves they made of bodies raised from the dead. I forget what name he gave to these creatures in the story, but I know he would have seen one in the thing that held Djoko Roespinoedji in its arms.

  ‘Do you like it?’ The boy, cuddled up obscenely close to the ravaged head, had been watching me.

  ‘Not much, no.’

  ‘Well, aesthetically, of course . . .’ The boy let his voice trail off delicately. ‘But with judicious use of bandaging, and some suitably ragged clothing for me, we should make a truly pitiful ensemble. The wounded and the innocent, fleeing from the ruins of their shattered lives - ideal camouflage, really, should things become extreme.’

  ‘Same old Djoko.’ Schneider came up and nudged me. ‘Like I told you. Always one step ahead of the action.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve known refugee columns get gunned down just for target practice.’

  ‘Oh, I’m aware of that. Our friend here was a tactical marine before he met his unfortunate end. Still quite a lot of ingrained reflex left in the cortex, or wherever it is they store that kind of thing.’ The boy winked at me. ‘I’m a businessman, not a technician. I had a software firm in Landfall knock what was left into usable shape. Look.’

  The child’s hand disappeared into his jacket and the dead man snatched a long-barrelled blaster from the scabbard across his back. It was very fast. The photoreceptors whirred audibly in their sockets, scanning left to right. Roespinoedji grinned broadly and his hand emerged clutching the remote. A thumb shifted and the blaster was returned smoothly to its sheath. The arm supporting the boy had not shifted an inch.

  ‘So you see,’ the boy piped cheerfully, ‘where pity cannot be mined, less subtle options are always available. But really, I’m optimistic. You’d be surprised how many soldiers still find it difficult to shoot small children, even in these troubled times. Now. Enough chatter, shall we eat?’

  Roespinoedji had the top floor and penthouse of a raddled warehouse block not far off touching distance from the tail of the dighead. We left all but two of the militia escort outside in the street and picked our way through cool gloom to where an industrial elevator stood in one corner. The animated dead man dragged the cage door aside with one hand. Metallic echoes chased around the empty space over our heads

  ‘I can remember,’ said the boy as we rose towards the roof, ‘when all this was stacked with grade-one artefacts, crated and tagged for airlift to Landfall. The inventory crews used to work shifts round the clock. The dighead never stopped, you could hear it running day and night under all the other sounds. Like a heartbeat.’

  ‘Is that what you used to do?’ asked Wardani. ‘Stack artefacts?’

  I saw Schneider smile to himself in the gloom.

  ‘When I was younger,’ said Roespinoedji, self-mocking. ‘But I was involved in a more. Organisational capacity, shall we say?’

  The elevator passed through the roof of the storage area and clanged to a halt in suddenly bright light. Sunlight strained through fabric-curtained windows into a reception lounge screened from the rest of the floor by amber-painted internal walls. Through the elevator cage I saw kaleidoscopic designs on carpets, dark wood flooring and long, low sofas arranged around what I took to be a small, internally-lit swimming pool. Then, as we stepped out, I saw that the floor recess held not water but a wide horizontal video screen on which a woman appeared to be singing. In two corners of the lounge, the image was duplicated in a more viewable format on two vertical stacks of more reasonably sized screens. The far wall held a long table on which someone had laid out enough food and drink for a platoon.

  ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ said Roespinoedji, as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. ‘I’ll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.’

  The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognisable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit Open Ground that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic suborgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.

  Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up station near the elevator, shrugged and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there.

  ‘Told you,’ said Schneider to me. ‘If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He’s interfaced with every player in Landfall.’

  ‘You mean he was before the war.’

  Schneider shook his head. ‘Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn’t still jacked into the machine.’

  ‘If he’s jacked into
the machine,’ I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, ‘how come he’s living in this shithole town?’

  ‘Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now that’s a shithole.’

  Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn’t.

  ‘Let’s wait,’ I said softly. ‘It’s only polite.’

  He snorted. ‘What do you think; he’s going to poison us? What for? There’s no angle in it.’

  But he left the food alone.

  The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitised, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, rebel operations neutralised.

  Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.

  ‘Ivanna and Kas,’ he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. ‘My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn’t you say? Or two. Now,’ he snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself in an adjacent sofa. ‘To business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?’

  ‘You’re not eating?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh.’ He smiled and gestured at his two companions. ‘Well, they are, and I’m really very fond of both of them.’

  Schneider looked embarrassed.

  ‘No?’ Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. ‘There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?’