‘Alright.’
‘I’d also suggest you start carrying one of these where it can’t be seen.’ I showed him the compact stunner Vongsavath had given me. ‘Cute, isn’t it? Navy standard issue apparently, out of the Nagini’s cockpit emergency box. In case of mutiny. Minimal consequences if you fuck up and shoot the wrong guy.’
He reached for the weapon.
‘Uh-uh. Get your own.’ I dropped the tiny weapon back into my jacket pocket. ‘Talk to Vongsavath. She’s tooled up, too. Three of us ought to be enough to stop anything before it gets started.’
‘Right.’ He closed his eyes again, pressed thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of his eyes. ‘Right.’
‘I know. It feels like someone really doesn’t want us to get through that gate, doesn’t it. Maybe you’re burning incense to the wrong guys.’
Outside, the ultravibe batteries cut loose again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ameli Vongsavath put us five kilometres up, flew about for a while and then kicked on the holding auto. The three of us crowded the cockpit and crouched around the flight display holo like hunter gatherers around a fire, waiting. When none of the Nagini’s systems had catastrophically failed three minutes later, Vongsavath pushed out a breath she seemed to have been holding since we stationed.
‘Probably never was anything to worry about,’ she said without much conviction. ‘Whoever’s been playing around in here isn’t likely to want to die with the rest of us, whatever else they might want to achieve.’
‘That,’ I said gloomily, ‘all depends on the level of your commitment.’
‘You’re thinking Ji—’
I put a finger to my lips. ‘No names. Not yet. Don’t shape your thoughts ahead of time. And besides, you might want to consider that all our saboteur would really need is a little faith in their recovery team. We’d all still be stack-intact if this thing fell out of the sky, wouldn’t we.’
‘Unless the fuel cells were mined, yes.’
‘There you are, then.’ I turned to Hand. ‘Shall we?’
It didn’t take long to find the damage. When Hand cracked the seal on the first high-impact shielded canister in the hold, the fumes that boiled out were enough to drive us both back up the hatch onto the crew deck. I slapped the emergency isolate panel and the hatch dropped and locked with a solid thump. I rolled onto my back on the deck, eyes streaming, hacking a cough that dug claws in the bottom of my lungs.
‘Holy. Fuck.’
Ameli Vongsavath darted into view. ‘Are you guys—’
Hand waved her back, nodding weakly.
‘Corrosion grenade,’ I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. ‘Must have just tossed it in and locked up after. What was in HIS One, Ameli?’
‘Give me a minute.’ The pilot went back into the cockpit to run the manifest. Her voice floated back through. ‘Looks like medical stuff, mostly. Back-up plugins for the autosurgeon, some of the anti-radiation drugs. Both ID&A sets, one of the major trauma mobility suits. Oh, and one of the Mandrake declared ownership buoys.’
I nodded at Hand.
‘Figures.’ I pushed myself into a sitting position against the curve of the hull. ‘Ameli, can you check where the other buoys are stored. And let’s get the hold vented before we open this hatch again. I’m dying fast enough, without that shit.’
There was a drink dispenser on the wall above my head. I reached up, tugged a couple of cans free and tossed one to Hand.
‘Here. Something to wash your alloy oxides down with.’
He caught the can and coughed out a laugh. I grinned back.
‘So.’
‘So.’ He popped the can. ‘Whatever leakage we had back in Landfall seems to have followed us here. Or do you think someone from outside crept into the camp last night and did this?’
I thought about it. ‘It’s stretching credibility. With the nanoware on the prowl, a two-ring sentry system, and lethal-dose radiation blanketing the whole peninsula, they’d have to be some kind of psychotic with a mission.’
‘The Kempists who got into the Tower at Landfall would fit that description. They were carrying stack burnouts, after all. Real death.’
‘Hand, if I was going up against the Mandrake Corporation, I’d probably fit myself with one of those. I’m sure your counterintelligence arm have some really lovely interrogation software.’
He ignored me, following up his train of thought.
‘Sneaking aboard the Nagini last night wouldn’t be a hard reprise for anyone who can crack the Mandrake Tower.’
‘No, but it’s more likely we’ve got leakage in the house.’
‘Alright, let’s assume that. Who? Your crew or mine?’
I tipped my head in the direction of the cockpit hatch and raised my voice.
‘Ameli, you want to kick on the auto and get in here. I’d hate you to think we’re talking about you behind your back.’
There was a very brief pause, and Ameli Vongsavath appeared in the hatchway, looking slightly uncomfortable.
‘Already on,’ she said. ‘I, uh, I was listening anyway.’
‘Good.’ I gestured her forward. ‘Because logic dictates that right now you’re the only person we can really trust.’
‘Thank you.’
‘He said logic dictates.’ Hand’s mood hadn’t improved since I hauled him out of prayers. ‘There are no compliments going down here, Vongsavath. You told Kovacs about the shutdown; that pretty much clears you.’
‘Unless I was just covering myself for when someone opened that canister and discovered my sabotage anyway.’
I closed my eyes. ‘Ameli . . .’
‘Your crew or mine, Kovacs.’ The Mandrake exec was getting impatient. ‘Which is it?’
‘My crew?’ I opened my eyes and stared at the labelling on my can. I’d already run this idea through a couple of times since Vongsavath’s revelation, and I thought I had the logic sorted. ‘Schneider probably has the flyer skills to shut down the onboard monitors. Wardani probably doesn’t. And in either case someone would have had to come up with a better offer than.’ I stopped and glanced towards the cockpit. ‘Than Mandrake has. That’s hard to imagine.’
‘It’s been my experience that enough political belief will short-circuit material benefit as a motivation. Could either of them be Kempists?’
I thought back down the line of my association with Schneider
I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes
and Wardani
Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered . . . if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there
‘I don’t see it, somehow.’
‘Wardani was in an internment camp.’
‘Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.’
Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.
‘Alright, my crew,’ he glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. ‘They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have got to them in that time.’
‘Do you trust Semetaire?’
‘I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.’
‘I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?’
Hand rolled his eyes.
‘Alright, who? Who’s your money on?’
‘There is another possibility you’re not considering.’
He looked across at me. ‘Oh, please. Not the half-metre fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.’
I shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an ex
pedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and,’ I jabbed a thumb at the floor, ‘we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.’
Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. ‘Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?’
‘Not that they noticed, no.’ I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. ‘But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of . . . I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.’
Hand snorted. ‘Which does what exactly?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.’ I saw the way they were both looking at me. ‘Alright, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.’
‘Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defence mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency. ’
‘You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?’
Hand shrugged. ‘Ask Kemp. He did it.’
‘Alright then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that levelled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?’
‘Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?’ Hand looked sceptical. ‘After a year? Come on.’
‘But what if you can’t stop it,’ I said softly.
It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.
‘What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioural protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.’
‘Eva—’ Hand saw where it was going and shut up.
‘You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.’
The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.
‘You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction IV?’ asked Hand finally. ‘A behavioural virus?’
‘Well it would explain the war,’ said Vongsavath brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.
The tension shattered.
Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.
Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage - a faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armoury stock.
Fuck.
A third of the anti-radiation chemicals. Lost.
Back-up software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.
One functional buoy left.
Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.
Corrosion within.
‘So what are you going to tell the rest?’ Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.
I traded glances with Hand.
‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Not a fucking thing. We keep this between the three of us. Write it off to an accident.’
‘Accident?’ Vongsavath looked startled.
‘He’s right, Ameli.’ I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. ‘There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was powerpack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.’
Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.
Corrosion within.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.
‘Are those webs?’ someone asked.
Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.
‘That is fast work,’ said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. ‘But to me it looks defensive.’
‘For the moment,’ Hand agreed.
‘Well, let’s keep it that way.’ Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. ‘We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.’
‘They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.’ Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. ‘They’ll learn and adapt on us again.’
Cruickshank made an angry gesture. ‘Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?’
‘That sounds like sense to me.’ Sutjiadi stood up. ‘Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.’
Sutjiadi got what he wanted.
After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processer and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.
I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we’d found in a locker on the bridge.
‘Very pretty,’ said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass. ‘And very crude.’
‘Well, it’s a war.’
He eyed me curiously. ‘Strange point of view for an Envoy.’
‘Ex-Envoy.’
‘Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety.’
‘When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.’
‘Innenin.’
‘Yeah, Innenin too.’ I looked into the dregs of my drink.
‘Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.’
‘You reckon?’ I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.
‘For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that fuck. War. Over.’
‘That’s simplistic, Deprez.’ I poured refills. ‘He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?’
‘Them too, of course.’ Deprez raised his glass. ‘Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?’
I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. ‘Do I look like an accountant?’
‘All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.’
‘Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that either.’
‘No,’ said the assassin sombrely. ‘That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.’
‘You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.’
He shook his head.
‘I know what I am,’ he said. ‘But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai - there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.’
I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die either.
Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.
The Complete SF Collection Page 75