The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.

  Don’t ask.

  ‘Well. We’re about ready to recruit, lieutenant, if you—’

  ‘Fine.’ I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. ‘Let’s go.’

  No one said anything. Schneider didn’t even look up, but Wardani’s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.

  We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator which named each floor for us as we passed it and outlined a few of Mandrake’s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-glass walls of the basement level. Iluminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing and on the far side of the open space a blob of hard sunlight signalled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-coloured cruiser was waiting.

  ‘Thaisawasdi Field,’ said Hand, leaning into the driver’s compartment. ‘The Soul Market.’

  The engine note dialled up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automould cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarised glass of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly towards the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiralled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.

  Hand touched a stud on the door and the glass polarised blue.

  ‘You were followed last night,’ he said matter of factly.

  I glanced across the compartment at him. ‘What for? We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’

  ‘Not by us.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that’s how we spotted them. But I’m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider - which incidentally wasn’t all that intelligent - and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn’t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved.’

  ‘Did you pick them up?’

  ‘No.’ Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. ‘The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they’d gone to ground near the Latimer canal head and by the time we got there, they were gone. We looked, but . . .’

  He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He’d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’

  ‘Sorry. Just touched. Protect and retrieve, huh?’

  ‘Ha ha.’ He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. ‘So, is there something you want to tell me?’

  I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Hand, be serious. If I’d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they’d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?’

  ‘So who were they?’

  ‘I thought I just told you I didn’t know. Street scum, maybe?’

  He gave me a pained look. ‘Street scum following a Carrera’s Wedge uniform?’

  ‘OK, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You’ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven’t you?’

  ‘Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn’t notice them, how likely is it they were that low-grade?’

  I sighed. ‘Not very.’

  ‘Precisely. So who else is trying to carve themselves a slice of artefact pie?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted gloomily.

  The rest of the flight passed in silence.

  Finally, the cruiser banked about and I tipped a glance out of the window. We were spiralling down towards what looked like a sheet of dirty ice littered with used bottles and cans. I frowned and recalibrated for scale.

  ‘Are these the original—?’

  Hand nodded. ‘Some of them, yes. The big ones. The rest are impounds, stuff from when the bottom fell out of the artefact market. Soon as you can’t pay your landing slot, they grab your haulage and grav-lift it out here until you do. Of course, with the way the market went, hardly anyone bothered even trying to pay off what they owed, so the Port Authority salvage crews went in and decommissioned them with plasma cutters.’

  We drifted in over the nearest of the grounded colony barges. It was like floating across a vast felled tree. Up at one end, the thrust assemblies that had propelled the vessel across the gulf between Latimer and Sanction IV were spread like branches, crushed to the landing field underneath and fanned stiffly against the hard blue sky above. The barge would never lift again, had in fact never been intended for more than a one-way trip. Assembled in orbit around Latimer a century ago, built only for the long blast across interstellar space and a single planetfall at journey’s end, she would have burnt out her antigrav landing system coming down. The detonation of the final touchdown repulsor jets would have fused the desert sand beneath into an oval of glass that would eventually be extended by engineers to join the similar ovals left by other barges and so create Thaisawasdi Field, to serve the fledgling colony for the first decade of its life.

  By the time the corporates got round to building their own private fields and the associated complexes, the barges would have been gutted, used initially to live out of, then as a ready source of refined alloys and hardware to build from. On Harlan’s World, I’d been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalised, carved back to multilevelled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull. Only the hulls themselves were ever left intact, out of some bizarre quasi-reverence of the kind that in earlier ages got successive generations to give up their lives to build cathedrals.

  The cruiser crossed the spine of the barge and slid down the curve of the hull to a soft landing in the pool of shadow cast by the grounded vessel. We climbed out into sudden cool and a quiet broken only by the whisper of a breeze across the glass plain and, faintly, the human sounds of commerce from within the hull.

  ‘This way.’ Hand nodded at the curving wall of alloy before us, and strode in towards a triangular cargo vent near ground level. I caught myself scanning the edifice for possible sniper points, shrugged off the reflex irritably and went after him. The wind swept detritus obligingly out of my way in little knee-high swirls.

  Close up, the cargo vent was huge, a couple of metres across at its apex and wide enough at base to permit the passage of a trolleyed marauder bomb fuselage. The loading ramp that led up to the entrance had doubled as a hatch when the barge was in flight and now it squatted on massive hydraulic haunches that hadn’t worked in decades. At the top the vent was flanked with carefully blurred holographic images that might have been either Martians or angels in flight.

  ‘Dig art,’ said Hand disparagingly. Then we were past them and into the vaulted gloom beyond.

  It was the same feeling of decayed space that I’d seen on Harlan’s World, but where the Harlan fleet hulks had been preserved with museum sobriety, this space was filled with a chaotic splatter of colour and sound. Stalls built from bright primary plastics and wire were cabled and epoxied seemingly at random up the curve of the hull and across what remained of the principal decks, giving the impression that a colony of poisonous mushrooms had infected the original structure. Sawn-off secti
ons of companionway and ladders of welded support struts linked it all together. Here and there more holographic art lent extra flare to the glow of lamps and illuminum strips. Music wailed and basslined unpredictably from hull-mounted speakers the size of crates. High above it all, someone had punched metre-width holes in the hull alloy so that beams of solid sunlight blasted through the gloom at tall angles.

  At the impact point of the closest beam stood a tall, raggedly dressed figure, sweat-beaded black face turned up to the light as if it were a warm shower. There was a battered black top hat jammed on his head and an equally well used long black coat draped across his gaunt frame. He heard our steps on the metal and pivoted, arms held cruciform.

  ‘Ah, gentlemen.’ The voice was a prosthetic bubbling, emitted by a rather obvious leech unit stapled to the scarred throat. ‘You are just in time. I am Semetaire. Welcome to the Soul Market.’

  Up on the axial deck, we got to watch the process begin.

  As we stepped out of the cage elevator, Semetaire moved aside and gestured with one rag-feathered arm.

  ‘Behold,’ he said.

  Out on the deck, a tracked cargo loader was backing up with a small skip held high in its lifting arms. As we watched, the skip tilted forward and something started to spill over the lip, cascading onto the deck and bouncing up again with a sound like hail stones.

  Cortical stacks.

  It was hard to tell without racking up the neurachem vision, but most of them looked too bulky to be clean. Too bulky, and too whitish-yellow with the fragments of bone and spinal tissue that still clung to the metal. The skip hinged further back, and the spillage became a rush, a coarse white-noised outpouring of metallic shingle. The cargo loader continued to backtrack, laying a thick, spreading trail of the stuff. The hailstorm built to a quick drumming fury, then choked up as the continuing cascade of stacks was soaked up by the mounds that had already fallen.

  The skip up-ended, emptied. The sound stopped.

  ‘Just in,’ observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. ‘Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid deployment casualties as well. We’re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp’s ground cover pretty badly.’

  ‘Not for the first time,’ I muttered.

  ‘Nor the last, we hope.’ Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. ‘Business has rarely been this good.’

  Something scraped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.

  All the way round the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, scraping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel-load rattled in the buckets like gravel.

  For all the competition for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I guessed and watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.

  ‘Most sell by gross weight,’ he murmured. ‘It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ said Hand curtly.

  Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man’s voice. ‘The point,’ he said courteously, ‘is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire. What do you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf ?’

  I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.

  Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn’t recognise, and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.

  ‘You are playing a dangerous game,’ said the Mandrake exec quietly. ‘And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?’

  Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimetres. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.

  ‘Slowly,’ I suggested.

  ‘There is no problem here, Kovacs.’ Hand’s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire’s. ‘The family ties have been established now.’

  Semetaire’s grin said that wasn’t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn’t show.

  ‘What is it you desire, company man?’

  ‘Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger.’

  ‘He’s not talking to you, Kovacs.’ Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. ‘Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we’re in a hurry. Whatever you’ve got on the slab.’

  Semetaire shrugged. ‘The freshest are here,’ he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cyclinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. ‘But if you are pressed for time . . .’

  He turned aside and led us to a sombrely-appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the bass-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors’ shovels and buckets behind us.

  Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier and she unwound herself languidly from amongst the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.

  I glanced at Hand.

  ‘The chosen of Ogon,’ he said, without apparent irony. ‘Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors.’

  He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then, she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.

  ‘How many kilos do you want?’ asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.

  Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.

  ‘How much are you going to gut me?’

  ‘Seventy-nine fifty the kilo.’

  The exec grunted. ‘Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it.’

  ‘That’s a dross price and you know it, company man.’ Semetaire shook his head, smiling. ‘Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn’t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior class, cleaned and anointed,
and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other’s time in this way.’

  ‘Alright.’ Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. ‘You’ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I’ll be back sometime.’

  ‘Sometime.’ Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. ‘Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead.’

  ‘We may indeed.’ Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. ‘And some of us sooner than others, if we go round making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire. ’

  The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.

  ‘Where would be the point in arresting me?’ he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. ‘Look at this. Without me, you’d only have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy.’

  ‘Sixty-seven fifty, and I’ll make you Mandrake’s preferred supplier.’

  Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. ‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. ‘I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up.’

  Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.

  ‘A find,’ said Semetaire lightly, and grinned.