The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Sidelined in the co-pilot’s seat, Schneider cast longing glances at the helm.

  ‘You’ll get your chance,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, when?’

  ‘When you’re a millionaire on Latimer.’

  He shot me a resentful glance and put one booted foot up on the console in front of him.

  ‘Ha fucking ha.’

  Below her closed eyes, Ameli Vongsavath’s mouth quirked. It must have sounded like an elaborate way of saying not in a million years. None of the Dangrek crew knew about the deal with Mandrake. Hand had introduced us as consultants, and left it at that.

  ‘You think it’ll go through the gate?’ I asked Schneider, trying to extract him from his sulk.

  He didn’t look up at me. ‘How the hell would I know?’

  ‘Just w—’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Ameli Vongsavath had still not opened her eyes. ‘Do you think I could have a little pre-swim quiet in here please?’

  ‘Yeah, shut up Kovacs,’ said Schneider maliciously. ‘Why don’t you get back with the passengers?’

  Back in the main cabin, the seats on either side of Wardani were taken by Hand and Sun Liping, so I crossed to the opposing side and dropped into the space next to Luc Deprez. He gave me a curious glance and then went back to examining his new hands.

  ‘Like it?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘It has a certain splendour. But I am not used to being so bulky, you know.’

  ‘You’ll settle into it. Sleeping helps.’

  The curious look again. ‘You know this for certain then. What kind of consultant are you exactly?’

  ‘Ex-Envoy.’

  ‘Really?’ He shifted in the seat. ‘That’s a surprise. You will have to tell me about this.’

  I caught echoes of his movement from other seats, where I’d been overheard. Instant notoriety. Just like being back in the Wedge.

  ‘Long story. And not very interesting.’

  ‘We are now one minute from launch,’ Ameli Vongsavath’s voice came through the intercom, sardonic, ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to officially welcome you aboard the fast assault launch Nagini and to warn you that if you are not now secured to a seat, I cannot guarantee your physical integrity for the next fifteen minutes.’

  There was a scrabble of activity along the two lines of seats. Grins broke out among those who had already webbed in.

  ‘I think she exaggerates,’ remarked Deprez, smoothing the webbing bond tabs unhurriedly into unity on the harness’s chest plate. ‘These vessels have good compensators.’

  ‘Well, you never know. Might catch some orbital fire on the way through.’

  ‘That’s right, Kovacs.’ Hansen grinned across at me. ‘Look on the positive side.’

  ‘Just thinking ahead.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’ asked Jiang suddenly.

  ‘Regularly. You?’

  ‘Fear is an inconvenience. You must learn to suppress it. That is what it is to be a committed soldier. To abandon fear.’

  ‘No, Jiang,’ said Sun Liping gravely. ‘That is what it is to be dead.’

  The assault ship tilted suddenly, and weight smashed down on my guts and chest. Blood-drained limbs. Crushed-out breath.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Ole Hansen through his teeth.

  It slacked off, presumably when we got orbital and some of the power Ameli Vongsavath had rammed into the lifters was allowed back into the onboard grav system. I rolled my head sideways to look at Deprez.

  ‘Exaggerates, huh?’

  He spotted blood from his bitten tongue onto his knuckle and looked at it critically. ‘I would call that exaggeration, yes.’

  ‘Orbital status attained,’ Vongsavath’s voice confirmed. ‘We have approximately six minutes of safe transit under the Landfall High Orbit Geosynch Umbrella. After that we’re exposed, and I’ll be throwing some evasive curves, so keep those tongues tucked up safe.’

  Deprez nodded glumly and held up his blood-spotted knuckle. Laughter down the gangway.

  ‘Hey, Hand,’ said Yvette Cruickshank. ‘How come the Cartel doesn’t just put up five, six of those HOGs, wide-spaced, and finish this war?’

  Further down the opposite row, Markus Sutjiadi smiled very slightly, but said nothing. His eyes flickered towards Ole Hansen.

  ‘Hey, Cruickshank.’ The demolitions expert could have been speaking on Sutjiadi’s cue. His tone was withering. ‘Can you even spell marauder? You got any idea what kind of target a HOG makes from shallow space?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cruickshank came back stubborn. ‘But most of Kemp’s marauders are on the ground now, and with the geosynchs in place . . .’

  ‘Try telling that to the inhabitants of Sauberville,’ Wardani told her, and the comment dragged a comet tail of quiet across the discussion. Glances shuttled back and forth up the gangway like slug-thrower shells chambering.

  ‘That attack was ground launched, Mistress Wardani,’ said Jiang finally.

  ‘Was it?’

  Hand cleared his throat. ‘In point of fact, the Cartel are not entirely sure how many of Kemp’s missile drones are still deployed off-planet—’

  ‘No shit,’ grunted Hansen.

  ‘—but to attempt high-orbit placement of any substantial platform at this stage would not be sufficiently—’

  ‘Profitable?’ asked Wardani.

  Hand gave her an unpleasant smile. ‘Low risk.’

  ‘We’re about to leave the Landfall HOG umbrella,’ said Ameli Vongsavath over the intercom, tour-guide calm. ‘Expect some kinks.’

  I felt a subtle increase in pressure at my temples as power diverted from the onboard compensators. Vongsavath getting ready for aerobatics around the curve of the world and down through re-entry. With the HOG setting behind us, there would be no more paternal corporate presence to cushion our fall back into the war zone. From here on in, we were out to play on our own.

  They exploit, and deal, and shift ground constantly, but for all that you can get used to them. You can get used to their gleaming company towers and their nanocopter security, their cartels and their HOGs, their stretched-over-centuries unhuman patience and their assumed inheritance of godfather status for the human race. You can get so you’re grateful for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief of whatever little flange of existence they afford you on the corporate platform. You can get so it seems eminently preferable to a cold gut-swooping drop into the human chaos waiting below.

  You can get so you’re grateful.

  Got to watch out for that.

  ‘Over the rim,’ said Ameli Vongsavath from the cockpit.

  We dropped.

  With the onboard comp running at combat minimum, it felt like the start of a grav jump, before the harness kicks in. My guts lifted to the base of my ribcage and the back of my eyeballs tickled. The neurachem fizzled sullenly to unwanted life and the bioalloy plates in my hands shivered. Vongsavath must have nailed us to the floor of Mandrake’s landing envelope and piled on everything the main drives would give her, hoping to beat any distant early-warned Kempist anti-incursion systems that might have decoded the flight path from Cartel traffic transmissions.

  It seemed to work.

  We came down in the sea about two kilometres off the Dangrek coast, Vongsavath using the water to crash cool re-entry surfaces in approved military fashion. In some places, environmental pressure groups have got violent over this kind of contamination, but somehow I doubted anyone on Sanction IV would be up for it. War has a soothing, simplifying effect on politics that must hit the politicians like a betathanatine rush. You don’t have to balance the issues any more, and you can justify anything. Fight and win, and bring the victory home. Everything else whites out, like the sky over Sauberville.

  ‘Surface status attained,’ intoned Vongsavath. ‘Preliminary sweeps show no traffic. I’m going for the beach on secondaries, but I’d like you to stay in your seats until advised otherwise. Commander Hand, we have a needlecast squirt from Isaac Carre
ra you might like to have a look at.’

  Hand traded glances with me. He reached back and touched the seat mike.

  ‘Run it on the discreet loop. Mine, Kovacs, Sutjiadi.’

  ‘Understood.’

  I pulled down the headset and settled the discreet reception mask over my face. Carrera came online behind the shrill warble of unravelling scrambler codes. He was in combat coveralls and a recently gelled wound was livid across his forehead and down one cheek. He looked tired.

  ‘This is Northern Rim Control to incoming FAL 931/4. We have your flight plan and mission filed but must warn you that under current circumstances we cannot afford ground or close detail aerial support. Wedge forces have fallen back to the Masson lake system where we are holding a defensive stance until the Kempist offensive has been assessed and its consequences correlated. A full-scale jamming offensive is expected in the wake of the bombing, so this is probably the last time you’ll be able to communicate effectively with anyone outside the blast zone. Additional to these strategic considerations, you should be aware that the Cartel have deployed experimental nanorepair systems in the Sauberville area. We cannot predict how these systems will react to unexpected incursions. Personally,’ he leaned forward in the screen, ‘my advice would be to withdraw on secondary drives as far as Masson and wait until I can order a reprise front back-up to the coast. This shouldn’t involve a delay of any more than two weeks. Blast research,’ a ripple of distaste passed across his face, as if he had just caught the odour of something rotting in his wounds, ‘is hardly a priority worthy of the risks you are running, whatever competitive advantage your masters may hope to gain from it. A Wedge incoming code is attached, should you wish to avail yourself of the fallback option. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do for you. Good luck. Out.’

  I unmasked and pushed back the headset. Hand was watching me with a faint smile tucked into one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Hardly a Cartel-approved perspective. Is he always that blunt?’

  ‘In the face of client stupidity, yes. It’s why they pay him. What’s this about experimental—’

  Hand made a tiny shutdown gesture with one hand. Shook his head.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Standard Cartel scare line. It keeps unwanted personnel out of the no-go zones.’

  ‘Meaning you called it in that way?’

  Hand smiled again. Sutjiadi said nothing, but his lips tightened. Outside, the engine note shrilled.

  ‘We’re on the beach,’ said Ameli Vongsavath. ‘Twenty-one point seven kilometres from the Sauberville crater. Pictures, anybody?’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Clotted white.

  For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.

  ‘Gulls,’ said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. ‘Radiation from the blast must have got them.’

  Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.

  When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV - and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter - they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.

  The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded with the minds of the colony elite, decanted and awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.

  Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.

  Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.

  So. Back to the lab.

  It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.

  On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.

  Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.

  A year passed.

  Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.

  Back to the lab.

  These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.

  Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth - tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.

  The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.

  The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to bla
ck and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.

  There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.

  ‘Nobody down here either,’ said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. ‘Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.’

  Sutjiadi frowned. ‘There’s food out?’

  ‘Yeah, lots of it.’ Deprez hauled himself out of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. ‘Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.’

  ‘I’ve had parties like that,’ said Vongsavath.

  Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.

  ‘Cruickshank is shooting the rats,’ he said. ‘They are quite large.’ Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. ‘Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?’

  ‘Rats?’ Deprez’s grin widened. ‘It is hard to tell.’

  I repressed a smile of my own.

  ‘Crew,’ said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. ‘How many crew, sergeant?’

  Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. ‘I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.’

  ‘I used to be a chef,’ said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. ‘Maybe I’ll go down and look.’