The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.’

  The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was moulded in lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. ‘Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-metre pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t think so.’ Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artefact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. ‘Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.’

  ‘Well you never know,’ I said easily. ‘No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.’

  ‘Oh, quite.’ He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. ‘But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do.’ An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiselled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. ‘Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.’

  The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.

  ‘Not one of yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Hardly.’ Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. ‘You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?’

  ‘I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.’

  Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrelled hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniper-scope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.

  Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past a hundred and fifty and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded towards the figure.

  ‘There you are. The corrosion begins.’ He started to eat. ‘Shall we get down to business then?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I tossed something across the table to him. ‘That’s yours, I think.’

  It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.

  ‘Deng?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What did you get out of him?’

  ‘Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.’ I shrugged. ‘He dropped your name before he realised I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.’

  Hand’s expression turned sceptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.

  ‘Did you really have to shoot them all?’ he asked finally.

  I shrugged. ‘That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. ‘So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?’

  I shrugged again. ‘Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘No. This is strictly personal.’

  ‘And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?’

  ‘Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it.’

  There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘That is so very elegant. Congratulations, lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.’

  ‘Yes, I could.’ I smiled back. ‘But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘Be quiet.’ Hand’s voice stayed gentle, but there was a sudden spike of steel under the suave tones. ‘We’re in the open here. If you want to do business with Mandrake, you’re going to have to learn a little discretion. No more specifics, please.’

  ‘Fine. Just as long as we understand each other.’

  ‘I think we do.’

  ‘I hope so.’ I let my own tone harden a little. ‘You underestimated me when you sent the goon squad out last night. Don’t do it again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream—’

  ‘That’s good. Don’t even dream about it, Hand. Because what happened to Deng and his pals last night doesn’t come close to some of the unpleasantries I’ve been party to in the last eighteen months up north. You may think the war’s a long way off right now, but if Mandrake tries to shaft me or my associates again, you’ll have a Wedge wake-up call rammed so far up your arse you’ll be able to taste your own shit in the back of your throat. Now, do we understand each other?’

  Hand made a pained face. ‘Yes. You’ve made your point very graphically. I assure you, there will be no more attempts to cut you out of the loop. That’s provided your demands are reasonable, of course. What kind of finder’s fee were you looking for?’

  ‘Twenty million UN dollars. And don’t look at me like that, Hand. It’s not even a tenth per cent of what Mandrake stands to make from this, if we’re successful.’

  Up on the holo, the asking price seemed to have braked at a hundred and nine and the auctioneer was now coaxing it upward a fraction at a time.

  ‘Hmm.’ Hand chewed and swallowed while he thought about it. ‘Cash on delivery?’

  ‘No. Up front, on deposit in a Latimer City bank. One-way transfer, standard seven-hour reversibility limit. I’ll give you the account codes later.’

  ‘That’s presumptuous, lieutenant.’

  ‘Call it insurance. Not that I don’t trust you, Hand, but I’ll feel happier knowing you’ve already made the payment. That way, there’s no percentage in Mandrake fucking me over after the event. You don’t stand to gain anything from it.’

  The Mandrake exec grinned wolfishly. ‘Trust works both ways, lieutenant. Why should we pay you before the project matures?’

  ‘Other than because if you don’t I’ll walk away from this table and you’ll lose the biggest R&D coup the Protectorate has ever seen, you mean?’ I let that sink in for a moment before I hit him with the relaxant. ‘Well, look
at it this way. I can’t access the money from here as long as the war’s on; the Emergency Powers Directive ensures that. So your money’s gone, but I don’t have it either. To get paid, I have to be on Latimer. That’s your guarantee.’

  ‘You want to go to Latimer as well?’ Hand raised an eyebrow. ‘Twenty million UN and passage offworld?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Hand. What did you expect? You think I want to wait around until Kemp and the Cartel finally decide it’s time to negotiate instead of fight? I don’t have that kind of patience.’

  ‘So.’ The Mandrake exec set down his chopsticks and steepled his hands on the table. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We pay you twenty million UN dollars, now. That’s non-negotiable.’

  I looked back at him, waiting.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stop you if you get off track.’

  The faint there-and-gone smile again. ‘Thank you. Then, upon successful completion of this project, we undertake to freight you, and presumably your associates, by needlecast to Latimer. Are those all of your demands?’

  ‘Plus decanting.’

  Hand looked at me strangely. I guessed he wasn’t used to his negotiations taking this path.

  ‘Plus decanting. Any specifics I should know about there?’

  I shrugged. ‘Selected sleeves, obviously, but we can discuss the specifics later. Doesn’t have to be custom. Something top of the range, obviously, but off the rack will do fine.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  I felt a grin floating up, tickling the inner surfaces of my belly. I let it surface. ‘Come on Hand. You’re getting a fucking bargain, and you know it.’

  ‘So you say. But it isn’t that simple, lieutenant. We’ve checked the Landfall artefact registry for the past five years, and there’s no trace of anything like the item you describe.’ He spread his hands. ‘No evidence. You can see my position.’

  ‘Yeah, I can. In about two minutes you’re about to lose the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years, and you’re going to do it because there’s nothing in your files about it. If that’s your position, Hand, I’m dealing with the wrong people.’

  ‘Are you saying this find went unregistered? In direct breach of the Charter?’

  ‘I’m saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we sent you looked real enough for either you or your pet AI to authorise a full urban commando strike inside half an hour. Maybe the files got wiped, maybe they were corrupted or stolen. Why am I even discussing this? Are you going to pay us, or are you going to walk?’

  Silence. He was pretty good - I still couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. He hadn’t shown me a single genuine emotion since we sat down. I waited. He sat back and brushed something invisible from his lap.

  ‘I’m afraid this will require some consultation with my colleagues. I’m not authorised to sign off on deals of this magnitude, with this little up front. Authorisation for the DHF needlecasting alone will need—’

  ‘Crap.’ I kept it friendly. ‘But go ahead. Consult. I can give you half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour?’

  Fear - the tiniest flicker of it at the narrowed corners of his eyes, but it was there and I felt the satisfaction come surging up from my stomach in the wake of the grin, savage with nearly two years of suppressed rage.

  Got you, motherfucker.

  ‘Sure. Thirty minutes. I’ll be right here. I hear the green tea sorbet’s pretty good in this place.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  I let the savagery corrode the edge of my voice. ‘Sure, I’m serious. I warned you about that. Don’t underestimate me again, Hand. You get me a decision inside thirty minutes or I walk out of here and go talk to someone else. I might even stiff you with the bill.’

  He jerked his head irritably.

  ‘And who would you go to?’

  ‘Sathakarn Yu? PKN?’ I gestured with my chopsticks. ‘Who knows? But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll work something out. You’ll be busy enough trying to explain to the policy board how you let this slip through your fingers. Won’t you?’

  Matthias Hand compressed a breath and got up. He sorted out a thin smile and flashed it at me.

  ‘Very well. I’ll be back shortly. But you have a little to learn about the art of negotiation, Lieutenant Kovacs.’

  ‘Probably. Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time up north.’

  I watched him walk away between the potential buyers on the balcony, and could not repress a faint shiver. If I was going to get my face lasered off, there was a good chance it would happen now.

  I was banking hard on an intuition that Hand had licence from the policy board to do pretty much what he wanted. Mandrake was the commercial world’s equivalent of Carrera’s Wedge, and you had to assume a corresponding approach to latitudes of initiative at executive levels. There was really no other way for a cutting-edge organism to work.

  Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.

  Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.

  Right, Takeshi?

  My face twitched.

  If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent re-sleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.

  Don’t expect anything and—

  And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.

  Don’t—

  Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.

  This fucking war.

  And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colours. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.

  Sold.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dangrek.

  The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.

  A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.

  ‘Should be colder than this,’ he said.

  ‘Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.’ I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. ‘This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?’

  ‘Not as yet.’ Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. ‘Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes . . .’

  He turned expectantly to Tanya
Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.

  ‘It’ll do,’ she said distantly. ‘I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.’

  ‘Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.’ A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.

  ‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Of course. This way.’

  She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.

  A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.

  I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.

  We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—

  I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.