The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.’ Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. ‘Knockdown price.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Yeah - call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-70, very little wear and no previous owner of record.’

  Roespinoedji smiled. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Check it if you like.’ Schneider swallowed his mouthful. ‘The datacore’s wiped cleaner than your tax records. Six hundred thousand klick range. Universal config, hard space, suborbital, submarine. Handles like a whorehouse harpy.’

  ‘Yes, I seem to remember the seventies were impressive. Or was it you that told me that, Jan?’ The boy stroked his beardless chin in a gesture that clearly belonged to a previous sleeve. ‘Never mind. This knockdown bargain comes armed, I assume.’

  Schneider nodded, chewing. ‘Micromissile turret, nose-mounted. Plus evasion systems. Full autodefensive software, very nice package. ’

  I coughed on a pastry.

  The two women drifted over to the sofa where Roespinoedji sat and arranged themselves in decorative symmetry on either side of him. Neither of them had said a word or made a sound that I could detect since they walked in. The woman on Roespinoedji’s left began to feed him from her plate. He leaned back against her and eyed me speculatively while he chewed what she gave him.

  ‘Alright,’ he said finally. ‘Six million.’

  ‘UN?’ asked Schneider, and Roespinoedji laughed out loud.

  ‘Saft. Six million saft.’

  The Standard Archaeological Find Token, created back when the Sanction government was still little more than a global claims administrator, and now an unpopular global currency whose performance against the Latimer franc it had replaced was reminiscent of a swamp panther trying to climb a fricfree-treated dock ramp. There were currently about two hundred and thirty saft to the Protectorate (UN) dollar.

  Schneider was aghast, his haggler’s soul outraged. ‘You cannot be serious, Djoko. Even six million UN’s only about half what it’s worth. It’s a Wu Morrison, man.’

  ‘Does it have cryocaps?’

  ‘Uhhh . . . No.’

  ‘So what the fuck use is it to me, Jan?’ Roespinoedji asked without heat. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right, and she passed him a wineglass without a word. ‘Look, at this precise moment the only use anyone outside the military has for a space rig is as a means of lifting out of here, beating the blockade and getting back to Latimer. That six-hundred-thousand-kilometre range can be modified by someone who knows what they’re doing, and the Wu Morrisons have goodish guidance systems, I know, but at the speed you’ll get out of an ISN-70, especially backyard customised, it’s still the best part of three decades back to Latimer. You need cryocapsules for that.’ He held up a hand to forestall Schneider’s protest. ‘And I don’t know anyone, anyone, who can get cryocaps. Not for cunt nor credit. The Landfall Cartel know what they’re about, Jan, and they’ve got it all welded shut. No one gets out of here alive - not until the war’s over. That’s the deal.’

  ‘You can always sell to the Kempists,’ I said. ‘They’re pretty desperate for the hardware, they’ll pay.’

  Roespinoedji nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Kovacs, they will pay, and they’ll pay in saft. Because it’s all they’ve got. Your friends in the Wedge have seen to that.’

  ‘Not my friends. I’m just wearing this.’

  ‘Rather well, though.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘What about ten,’ said Schneider hopefully. ‘Kemp’s paying five times that for reconditioned suborbitals.’

  Roespinoedji sighed. ‘Yes, and in the meantime I have to hide it somewhere, and pay off anyone who sees it. It’s not a dune scooter, you know. Then I have to make contact with the Kempists, which as you may be aware carries a mandatory erasure penalty these days. I have to arrange a covert meeting, oh and with armed back-up in case these toy revolutionaries decide to requisition my merchandise instead of paying up. Which they often do if you don’t come heavy. Look at the logistics, Jan. I’m doing you a favour, just taking it off your hands. Who else were you going to go to?’

  ‘Eight—’

  ‘Six is fine,’ I cut in swiftly. ‘And we appreciate the favour. But how about you sweeten our end with a ride into Landfall and a little free information? Just to show we’re all friends.’

  The boy’s gaze sharpened and he glanced towards Tanya Wardani.

  ‘Free information, eh?’ He raised his eyebrows, twice in quick succession, clownishly. ‘Of course there’s really no such thing, you know. But just to show we’re all friends. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Landfall.’ I said. ‘Outside of the Cartel, who are the razorfish? I’m talking about second-rank corporates, maybe even third rank. Who’s tomorrow’s shiny new dream at the moment?’

  Roespinoedji sipped meditatively at his wine. ‘Hmm. Razorfish. I don’t believe we have any of those on Sanction IV. Or Latimer, come to that.’

  ‘I’m from Harlan’s World.’

  ‘Oh, really. Not a Quellist, I assume.’ He gestured at the Wedge uniform. ‘Given your current political alignment, I mean.’

  ‘You don’t want to oversimplify Quellism. Kemp keeps quoting her, but like most people he’s selective.’

  ‘Well, I really wouldn’t know.’ Roespinoedji put up one hand to block the next piece of food his concubine was readying for him. ‘But your razorfish. I’d say you’ve got a half dozen at most. Late arrivals, most of them Latimer-based. The interstellars blocked out most of the local competition until about twenty years ago. And now of course they’ve got the Cartel and the government in their pocket. There’s not much more than scraps for everybody else. Most of the third rank are getting ready to go home; they can’t really afford the war.’ He stroked at his imagined beard. ‘Second rank, well . . . Sathakarn Yu Associates maybe, PKN, the Mandrake Corporation. They’re all pretty carnivorous. Might be a couple more I can dig out for you. Are you planning to approach these people with something? ’

  I nodded. ‘Indirectly.’

  ‘Yes, well, some free advice to go with your free information, then. Feed it to them on a long stick.’ Roespinoedji raised his glass towards me and then drained it. He smiled affably. ‘Because if you don’t, they’ll take your hand off at the shoulder.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Like a lot of cities that owe their existence to a spaceport, Landfall had no real centre. Instead it sprawled haphazardly across a broad semi-desert plain in the southern hemisphere where the original colony barges had touched down a century ago. Each corporation holding stock in the venture had simply built its own landing field somewhere on the plain and surrounded it with a ring of ancillary structures. In time those rings had spread outwards, met each other and eventually merged into a warren of acentric conurbation with only the vaguest of overall planning to link it all together. Secondary investors moved in, renting or buying space from the primaries and carving themselves niches in both the market and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Meanwhile, other cities arose elsewhere on the globe, but the Export Quarantine clause in the Charter ensured that all the wealth generated by Sanction IV’s archaeological industries had at some point to pass through Landfall. Gorged on an unrestricted diet of artefact export, land allocation and dig licensing, the former spaceport had swelled to monstrous proportions. It now covered two-thirds of the plain and, with twelve million inhabitants, was home to almost thirty per cent of what was left of Sanction IV’s total population.

  It was a pit.

  I walked with Schneider through badly-kept streets full of urban detritus and reddish desert sand. The air was hot and dry and the shade cast by the blocks on either side provided little respite from the high-angled rays of the sun. I could feel sweat beading on my face and soaking the hair at the back of my neck. In windows and mirror-shielded frontages along the way, our black-uniformed reflections kept pace. I was almost glad of the company. There was no one el
se out in the midday heat and the shimmering stillness of it was uncanny. The sand crunched audibly underfoot.

  The place we were looking for wasn’t hard to find. It stuck up at the edge of the district like a burnished bronze conning tower, double the height of the surrounding blocks and utterly featureless from the outside. Like much of the architecture in Landfall, it was mirror-surfaced and the reflected sun made its edges difficult to look at directly. It wasn’t the tallest tower in Landfall, but the structure had a raw power to it that throbbed across the surrounding urban sprawl and spoke volumes about its designers.

  Testing the human frame to destruction

  The phrase flopped out of my memory like a corpse from a closet.

  ‘How close you want to get?’ asked Schneider nervously.

  ‘A bit closer.’

  The Khumalo sleeve, like all Carrera’s Wedge custom, had a satdata locational display wired in as standard and reckoned to be quite user-friendly when not fucked up by the webs of jamming and counter-jamming that currently swathed most of Sanction IV. Blinked up to focus now, it gave me a mesh of streets and city blocks covering my whole left field of vision. Two tagged dots pulsed minutely on a thoroughfare.

  Testing the—

  I overcued the tightlock fractionally and the view dizzied up until I was looking at the top of my own head from block-top height.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’ Beside me, Schneider had tensed up in what he obviously imagined was a stance of ninja combat readiness. Behind his sunlenses, he looked comically worried.

  Testing—

  ‘Forget it.’ I scaled back up until the tower re-emerged on the edge of the display. A shortest-possible route lit up obligingly in yellow, threading us to the building through a pair of intersections. ‘This way.’

  Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines

  A couple of minutes down the yellow line, one of the streets gave onto a narrow suspension bridge over a dry canal. The bridge sloped upward slightly along its twenty-metre length to meet a raised concrete flange on the far side. Two other bridges paralleled the crossing a hundred metres down on either side, also sloping upward. The floor of the canal bore a scattering of the debris any urban area will breed - discarded domestic devices spilling circuitry from cracked casings, emptied food packages and sun-bleached knots of cloth that reminded me of machine-gunned bodies. Over it all and on the other side of this dumping ground, the tower waited.

  Testing the human

  Schneider hovered on the threshold of the bridge.

  ‘You going across?’

  ‘Yeah, and so are you. We’re partners, remember.’ I shoved him lightly in the small of the back and followed up so close he’d have to go on. There was a slightly hysterical good humour brewing in me as the Envoy conditioning strove to fend off the unsubtle doses of combat prep hormones my sleeve sensed were required.

  ‘I just don’t think this is—’

  ‘If anything goes wrong, you can blame me.’ I nudged him again. ‘Now come on.’

  ‘If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dead,’ he muttered morosely.

  ‘Yeah, at least.’

  We crossed, Schneider holding onto the rails as if the bridge were swaying in a high wind.

  The flange on the other side turned out to be the edge of a featureless fifty-metre access plaza. We stood two metres in, looking up at the impassive face of the tower. Whether intentionally or not, whoever had built the concrete apron around the building’s base had created a perfect killing field. There was no cover in any direction and the only retreat was back along the slim, exposed bridge or a bone-shattering jump into the empty canal.

  ‘Open ground, all around,’ sang Schneider under his breath, picking up on the cadence and lyrics of the Kempist revolutionary hymn of the same name. I couldn’t blame him. I’d caught myself humming the fucking thing a couple of times since we got into the unjammed airspace around the city - the Lapinee version was everywhere, close enough to the Kempist original to activate recall from last year. Back then, you could hear the original playing on the Rebels’ propaganda channels whenever and wherever the government jamming went down. Telling the - apparently edifying - story of a doomed platoon of volunteers holding a position against overwhelming odds for love of Joshua Kemp and his revolution, the anthem was sung against a catchy junk salsa backdrop that tended to stick in your head. Most of my men in the Northern Rim assault force could sing it by heart, and often did, to the fury of Cartel political officers, who were mostly too scared of the Wedge uniforms to make something of it.

  In fact, the melody had proven so virulently memetic that even the most solidly pro-corporate citizens were unable to resist absent-mindedly humming it. This, plus a network of Cartel informers working on a commission-only basis, was enough to ensure that penal facilities all over Sanction IV were soon overflowing with musically-inclined political offenders. In view of the strain this put on policing, an expensive consulting team was called in and rapidly came up with a new set of sanitised lyrics to fit the original melody. Lapinee, a construct vocalist, was designed and launched to front the replacement song, which told the story of a young boy, orphaned in a Kempist sneak raid but then adopted by a kindly corporate bloc and brought up to realise his full potential as a top-level planetary executive.

  As a ballad, it lacked the romantic blood and glory elements of the original, but since certain of the Kempist lyrics had been mirrored with malice aforethought, people generally lost track of which song was which and just sang a mangled hybrid of both, sewn together with much salsa-based humming. Any revolutionary sentiments got thoroughly scrambled in the process. The consulting team got a bonus, plus spin-off royalties from Lapinee, who was currently being plugged on all state channels. An album was in the offing.

  Schneider stopped his humming. ‘Think they’ve got it covered?’

  ‘Reckon so.’ I nodded towards the base of the tower, where burnished doors fully five metres high apparently gave access. The massive portal was flanked by two plinths on which stood examples of abstract art each worthy of the title Eggs Collide in Symmetry or - I racked up the neurachem to be sure - Overkill Hardware Semi-deployed .

  Schneider followed my gaze. ‘Sentries?’

  I nodded. ‘Two slug autocannon nests and at least four separate beam weapons that I can see from here. Very tastefully done, too. You’d barely notice them in amongst all that sculpture.’

  In a way, it was a good sign.

  In the two weeks we’d spent in Landfall so far, I hadn’t seen much sign of the war beyond a slightly higher uniform count on the streets in the evenings and the occasional cyst of a rapid response turret on some of the taller buildings. Most of the time, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening on another planet. But if Joshua Kemp did finally manage to fight his way through to the capital, the Mandrake Corporation at least looked to be ready for him.

  Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines central to the Mandrake Corporation’s current research programme. Maximum utility for ALL resources is our ultimate goal.

  Mandrake had only acquired the site a decade ago. That they had built with armed insurrection in mind showed strategic thinking way in advance of any of the other corporate players at this particular table. Their corporate logo was a chopped strand of DNA afloat on a background of circuitry, their publicity material was just the right side of shrill in its aggressive, more-for-your-investment-dollar new-kid-on-the-block pitch, and their fortunes had risen sharply with the war.

  Good enough.

  ‘Think they’re looking at us now?’

  I shrugged. ‘Always someone looking at you. Fact of life. Question is whether they noticed us.’

  Schneider pulled an exasperated face. ‘Think they noticed us, then?’

  ‘I doubt it. The automated systems won’t be tuned for it. War’s too far off for emergency default settings. These are frien
dly uniforms, and curfew isn’t till ten. We’re nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Yet.’

  ‘Yet,’ I agreed, turning away. ‘So let’s go and get noticed.’

  We headed back across the bridge.

  ‘You don’t look like artists,’ said the promoter as he punched in the last of our encoding sequence. Out of uniform and into nondescript civilian clothing bought that morning, we’d been calibrated the moment we walked in the door and, by the look of it, found lacking.

  ‘We’re security,’ I told him pleasantly. ‘She’s the artist.’

  His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.

  ‘Well.’ He maximised a traffic display and studied it for a moment. ‘I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.’

  ‘What, like Lapinee?’

  The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.

  ‘Don’t laugh at the majors, friend,’ he said easily. ‘I had even a two per cent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now,’ he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired. ‘Whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty fucking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.’

  ‘Are you this positive with all your clients?’ I asked him.