‘Was he? Why don’t you call him?’
I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.
Just killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.
Hand had his audio phone open.
‘Wake up Deng Zhao Jun please.’ He waited. ‘I see. Well, try that then.’
I shook my head.
‘That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.’
Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.
‘Hand, I practically told him to do it.’ I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. ‘Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.’
‘I did not assign Deng, goddamn you Kovacs.’ He was hanging onto his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. ‘And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes this is Hand.’
He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.
‘Deng left the tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.’
‘Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?’
‘Kovacs.’ The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Alright? I don’t. Want to hear it.’
I shrugged.
‘No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.’ Hand breathed out, compressed.
‘I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.’ He turned on his heel. ‘You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.’
I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.
Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.
‘Oh.’ He turned to face us. ‘By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred per cent casualties.’
I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.
Hand stood there and watched it happen.
‘Thought you’d both like to know that,’ he said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dangrek.
The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.
At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.
‘Proud of yourself, Kovacs?’
Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from further up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.
I went after her.
‘You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,’ I told her when I caught up. ‘And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.’
‘Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.’
It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it non-stop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.
The MAI had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating grey fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.
‘Sutjiadi, get your team deployed.’
It was Hand’s voice, drumming through the induction rig speaker. A loose exchange of military shorthand followed and in irritation I yanked the speaker away from its resting place behind my ear. I ignored the footfalls of someone tramping up the slope behind us and focused on the locked posture of Tanya Wardani’s head and neck.
‘I guess it was quick for them,’ she said, still staring out at the headland.
‘Like the song says. Nothing faster.’
‘Mistress Wardani.’ It was Ole Hansen, some echo of the arc-light intensity from his original blue eyes somehow burning through the wide-set dark gaze of his new sleeve. ‘We’ll need to see the demolition site.’
She choked back something that might have been a laugh, and didn’t say the obvious thing.
‘Sure,’ she said instead. ‘Follow me.’
I watched the two of them pick their way down the other side of the slope towards the beach.
‘Hoy! Envoy guy!’
I turned unwillingly, and spotted Yvette Cruickshank navigating her Maori sleeve uncertainly up the slope towards me, Sunjet slung flat across her chest and a set of ranging lenses pushed up on her head. I waited for her to reach me, which she did without tripping in the long grass more than a couple of times.
‘How’s the new sleeve?’ I called as she stumbled for the second time.
‘It’s—’ She shook her head, closed the gap and started again, voice lowered back to normal. ‘’s a fraction strange, know what I mean?’
I nodded. My first re-sleeve was more than thirty subjective years in my past, objectively close to two centuries ago, but you don’t forget. The initial re-entry shock never really goes away.
‘Bit fucking pallid, too.’ She pinched up the skin on the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘How come I couldn’t get some fine black cover like yours?’
‘I didn’t get killed,’ I reminded her. ‘Besides, once the radiation starts to bite, you’re going to be glad. What you’re wearing there needs about half the dosage I’ll be taking to stay operational.’
She scowled. ‘Still going to get us all in the end, though, isn’t it.’
‘It’s only a sleeve, Cruickshank.’
‘That’s right, just give me some of that Envoy cool.’ She barked a laugh and upended her Sunjet, gripping the short, thick barrel disconcertingly in one slim hand. Squinting up from the discharge channel and directly at me, she asked, ‘Think you could go for a white-girl sleeve like this then?’
I considered. The Maori combat sleeves were long on limb and broad in the chest and shoulders. A lot of them, like this one, were pale-skinned, and being fresh out of the clone tanks accentuated the effect, but faces ran to high cheekbones, wide spaced eyes and flaring lips and noses. White-girl sleeve seemed a little harsh. And even inside the shapeless battlefield chameleochrome coveralls . . .
‘You going to look like that,’ Cruickshank remarked, ‘you’d better be buying something.’
‘Sorry. Just giving the question my full consideration.’
‘Yeah. Skip it. I wasn’t that worried. You were operational around here, weren’t you?’
‘A couple of months back.’
‘So what was it like?’
I shrugged. ‘People shooting at you. Air full of pieces of fast-moving metal looking for a home. Pretty standard stuff. Why?’
‘I heard the Wedge got a pasting. That true?’
‘It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.’
&nb
sp; ‘So how come Kemp suddenly decides, from a position of strength, to cut and nuke?’
‘Cruickshank.’ I started and then stopped, unable to think of a way to get through the armour plate of youth she was wearing. She was twenty-two, and like all twenty-two year olds she thought she was the immortal focal point of this universe. Sure she’d been killed, but so far all that had done was prove the immortal part. It would not have occurred to her that there might be a world view in which what she saw was not only marginal but almost wholly irrelevant.
She was waiting for an answer.
‘Look,’ I said finally. ‘No one told me what we were fighting for up here, and from what we got out of the prisoners we interrogated, I’d say they didn’t know either. I gave up expecting this war to make sense a while ago, and I’d advise you to do the same if you plan on surviving much more of it.’
She raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that she hadn’t quite got nailed in her new sleeve.
‘So you don’t know, then.’
‘No.’
‘Cruickshank!’ Even with my own induction rig unhooked, I heard the tinny crash of Markus Sutjiadi’s voice over the comlink. ‘You want to get down here and work for a living like the rest of us?’
‘Coming, cap.’ She pulled a mouth-down face in my direction and started back down the slope. A couple of steps down, she stopped and turned back.
‘Hey, Envoy guy.’
‘Yeah?’
‘That stuff about the Wedge taking a pasting? Wasn’t a crit, OK. Just what I heard.’
I felt myself grinning at the carefully deployed sensitivity.
‘Forget it, Cruickshank. Couldn’t give a shit. I’m more bent out of shape you didn’t like me drooling on you.’
‘Oh.’ She grinned back. ‘Well, I guess I did ask.’ Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she crossed her eyes for effect. ‘What about I get back to you on that one?’
‘Do that.’
The induction rig buzzed against my neck. I stuck it back in place and hooked up the mike.
‘Yeah, Sutjiadi?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble, sir,’ the irony dripped off the last word, ‘would you mind leaving my soldiers alone while they deploy?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Won’t happen again.’
‘Good.’
I was about to disconnect when Tanya Wardani’s voice came across the net in soft expletives.
‘Who’s that?’ snapped Sutjiadi. ‘Sun?’
‘I don’t fucking believe this.’
‘It’s Mistress Wardani, sir.’ Ole Hansen came in, laconically calm, over the muttered curses from the archaeologue. ‘I think you’d better all get down here and take a look at this.’
I raced Hand to the beach and lost by a couple of metres. Cigarettes and damaged lungs don’t count in a virtuality, so it must have been concern for Mandrake’s investment that drove him. Very commendable. Still not attuned to their new sleeves, the rest of the party fell behind us. We reached Wardani alone.
We found her in much the same position she’d taken up facing the rockfall last time we’d been in the construct. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at.
‘Where’s Hansen?’ I asked stupidly.
‘He went in,’ she said, waving a hand forward. ‘For what it’s worth.’
Then I saw it. The pale bite-marks of recent blasting, gathered around a two-metre fissure opened in the fall, and a path winding out of sight beyond.
‘Kovacs?’ There was a brittle lightness to the query in Hand’s tone.
‘I see it. When did you update the construct?’
Hand stalked closer to examine the blasting marks. ‘Today.’
Tanya Wardani nodded to herself. ‘High-orbit satellite geoscan, right?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Well.’ The archaeologue turned away and reached in her coat pocket for cigarettes. ‘We aren’t going to find anything out here then.’
‘Hansen!’ Hand cupped his hands and shouted into the fissure, the induction rig he was wearing apparently forgotten.
‘I hear you.’ The demolition expert’s voice came thrumming back on the rig, detached and edged with a smirk. ‘There’s nothing back here.’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ commented Wardani, to nobody in particular.
‘. . . some kind of circular clearing, about twenty metres across, but the rocks look strange. Kind of fused.’
‘That’s improvisation,’ said Hand impatiently into the rig mike. ‘The MAI’s guessing at what’s in there.’
‘Ask him if there’s anything in the middle,’ said Wardani, kindling her cigarette against the breeze off the sea.
Hand relayed the query. The answer crackled back over the set.
‘Yeah, some kind of central boulder, maybe a stalagmite.’
Wardani nodded. ‘That’s your gate,’ she said. ‘Probably old echo-sounding data the MAI reeled in from some flyby area recon a while ago. It’s trying to map the data with what it can see from the orbital view, and since it’s got no reason to believe there’s anything in there but rocks—’
‘Someone’s been here,’ said Hand, jaw set.
‘Well yes.’ Wardani blew out smoke and pointed. ‘Oh, and there’s that.’
Anchored in the shallows a few hundred metres along the beach, a small, battered-looking trawler wagged back and forth in a longshore current. Her nets spilled over the side like something escaping.
The sky whited out.
It wasn’t quite as rough a ride as the ID&A set had been, but still, the abrupt return to reality impacted on my system like a bath of ice, chilling extremities and sending a shiver deep through the centre of my guts. My eyes snapped open on the expensive empathist psychogram art.
‘Oh, nice,’ I grumbled, sitting up in the soft lighting and groping around for the ’trodes.
The chamber door hinged outward on a subdued hum. Hand stood in the doorway, clothing still fully not closed up, limned from behind by the brightness of normal lights. I squinted at him.
‘Was that really necessary?’
‘Get your shirt on, Kovacs.’ He was closing his own at the neck as he spoke. ‘We’ve got things to do. I want to be on the peninsula by this evening.’
‘Aren’t you overreacting a li—’
He was already turning away.
‘Hand, the recruits aren’t used to those sleeves yet. Not by a long way.’
‘I left them in there.’ He flung the words back over his shoulder. ‘They can have another ten minutes - that’s two days virtual time. Then we download them for real and leave. If someone’s up at Dangrek ahead of us, they’re going to be very sorry.’
‘If they were there when Sauberville went down,’ I shouted after him, suddenly furious. ‘They’re probably already very sorry. Along with everyone else.’
I heard his footsteps, receding up the corridor. Mandrake Man, shirt closed up, suit settling onto squared shoulders, moving forward. Enabled. About Mandrake’s heavy-duty business, while I sat barechested in a puddle of my own unfocused rage.
PART THREE
Disruptive Elements
The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn’t offer this assurance, so it’s very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you’re in control.
Quellcrist Falconer Ethics on the Precipice
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There is no subtle way to deploy an IP vessel across half a planet. So we didn’t try.
Mandrake booked us a priority launch and landing parabola with the Cartel’s suborbital traffic arm, and we flew out to an anonymous landing field on the outskirts of Landfall just as the heat was leaching out of the afternoon. There was a shiny new Lockheed Mitoma IP assault ship dug into the concrete, looking like nothing so much as a smoked glass scorpion someone had ripped the fighting claws off. Ameli Vongsavath grunted in approval when she saw it.
&nb
sp; ‘Omega series,’ she said to me, mainly because I happened to be standing next to her when we climbed out of the cruiser. She was fixing her hair reflexively as she spoke, twisting the thick black strands up and clear of the flight symbiote sockets at her nape, pegging the loosely gathered bun in place with static clips. ‘You could fly that baby right down Incorporation Boulevard and not even scorch the trees. Put plasma torpedoes through the front door of the Senate House, stand on your tail and be in orbit before they blew.’
‘For example,’ I said dryly. ‘Of course, with those mission objectives, you’d be a Kempist, which means you’d be flying some beaten-up piece of shit like a Mowai Ten. Right, Schneider?’
Schneider grinned. ‘Yeah, doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘What doesn’t bear thinking about?’ Yvette Cruickshank wanted to know. ‘Being a Kempist?’
‘No, flying a Mowai,’ Schneider told her, eyes flickering up and down the frame of her Maori combat sleeve. ‘Being a Kempist’s not so bad. Well, apart from all the pledge singing.’
Cruickshank blinked. ‘You were really a Kempist?’
‘He’s joking,’ I said, with a warning glance at Schneider. There was no political officer along this time, but Jiang Jianping at least seemed to have strong feelings about Kemp, and there was no telling how many other members of the team might share them. Stirring up potential animosities just to impress well-shaped women didn’t strike me as all that smart.
Then again, Schneider hadn’t had his hormones wrung out in virtual that morning, so maybe I was just being unduly balanced about the whole thing.
One of the Lock Mit’s loading hatches hinged up. A moment later Hand appeared in the entrance in neatly pressed combat chameleochrome, now smoky grey against the prevalent hue of the assault ship. The change from his usual corporate attire was so complete it jarred, for all that everyone else was similarly dressed.
‘Welcome to the fucking cruise,’ muttered Hansen.
We cleared for dust-off five minutes before Mandrake’s authorised launch envelope opened. Ameli Vongsavath put the flight plan to bed in the Lock Mit’s datacore, powered up the systems and then to all appearances went to sleep. Jacked in at nape and cheekbone, eyes shuttered down, she lay back in her borrowed Maori flesh like the cryocapped princess in some obscure Settlement Years fairytale. She’d scored perhaps the darkest, slimmest built of the sleeves, and the datacables stood out against her skin like pale worms.
The Complete SF Collection Page 68