The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Sutjiadi wasn’t stupid. He heard the cabling buried in Hand’s voice and shot me another look, questioning.

  I shrugged, and weighed in on the side of Hand’s deception. What are Envoys for, after all?

  ‘Look at it this way, Sutjiadi. If they knew you were on board, they’d probably shoot us down anyway, just to get to you.’

  ‘Carrera’s Wedge,’ said Hand stiffly, ‘will do no such thing while they are under contract to the Cartel.’

  ‘Don’t you mean the government?’ jeered Schneider. ‘I thought this war was an internal matter, Hand.’

  Hand shot him a weary look.

  ‘Vongsavath.’ Sutjiadi had chinned his mike to the general channel. ‘You there?’

  ‘In place.’

  ‘And the rest of you?’

  Four more voices thrummed in the induction mike at my ear. Hansen and Jiang taut with alertness, Deprez laconic and Sun somewhere in between.

  ‘Map a launch and landing. Here to Landfall. We expect to be out of here in another seven hours.’

  A round of cheers rang through the induction mike at my ear.

  ‘Try to get some idea of what the suborbital traffic’s like along the curve, but maintain transmission silence until we lift. Is that clear?’

  ‘Silent running,’ said Vongsavath. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Good.’ Sutjiadi nodded at Cruickshank, and the Limon woman loped out of the cavern. ‘Hansen, Cruickshank’s coming down to help prep the claim buoy. That’s all. The rest of you, stay sharp.’ Sutjiadi unlocked his posture slightly and turned to face the archaeologue. ‘Mistress Wardani, you look ill. Is there anything remaining for you to do here?’

  ‘I—’ Wardani sagged visibly over the console. ‘No, I’m done. Until you want the damned thing closed again.’

  ‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ Hand called out from where he stood to one side of the gate, looking up at it with a distinctly proprietorial air. ‘With the buoy established, we can notify the Cartel and bring in a full team. With Wedge support, I imagine we can render this a ceasefire zone’ - he smiled - ‘rather rapidly.’

  ‘Try telling that to Kemp,’ said Schneider.

  ‘Oh, we will.’

  ‘In any case, Mistress Wardani.’ Sutjiadi’s tone was impatient. ‘I suggest you return to the Nagini as well. Ask Cruickshank to jack her field medic programme and look you over.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  Wardani shook her head and propped herself upright. ‘I thought one of us should say it.’

  She left without a backward glance. Schneider looked at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, went after her.

  ‘You’ve got a way with civilians, Sutjiadi. Anyone ever tell you that?’

  He stared at me impassively. ‘Is there some reason for you to stay?’

  ‘I like the view.’

  He made a noise in his throat and looked back at the gate. You could tell he didn’t like doing it, and with Cruickshank gone, he was letting the feeling leak out. There was a gathered stiffness about his stance as soon as he faced the device, something akin to the tension you see in bad fighters before a bout.

  I put up a flat hand in clear view, and after a proper pause I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t tell me this thing scares you, Sutjiadi. Not the man who faced down Dog Veutin and his whole squad. You were my hero for a while, back there.’

  If he thought it was funny, he kept it to himself.

  ‘Come on, it’s a machine. Like a crane, like a.’ I groped about for appropriate comparisons. ‘Like a machine. That’s all it is. We’ll be building these ourselves in a few centuries. Take out the right sleeve insurance, you might even live to see it.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said distantly. ‘This isn’t like anything human.’

  ‘Oh shit, you’re not going to get mystical on me, are you?’ I glanced across to where Hand stood, suddenly feeling unfairly ganged-up on. ‘Of course it isn’t like anything human. Humans didn’t build it, the Martians did. But they’re just another race. Smarter than us maybe, further ahead than us maybe, but that doesn’t make them gods or demons, does it? Does it?’

  He turned to face me. ‘I don’t know. Does it?’

  ‘Sutjiadi, I swear you’re beginning to sound like that moron over there. This is technology you’re looking at.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a threshold we’re about to step over. And we’re going to regret it. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the. The waiting in it?’

  ‘No, but I can feel the waiting in me. If this thing creeps you out so much, can we go and do something constructive.’

  ‘That would be good.’

  Hand seemed content to stay and gloat over his new toy, so we left him there and made our way back along the tunnel. Sutjiadi’s jitters must have sparked across to me somehow though, because as the first twist took us out of sight of the activated gate, I had to admit that I felt something on the back of my neck. It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind.

  At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within.

  I shook the thought loose irritably.

  ‘You happy now?’ I enquired acidly, as we stepped out into the light.

  ‘I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t get you, Sutjiadi. Landfall’s built within sniper fire of six major digs. This whole planet is riddled with Martian ruins.’

  ‘I’m from Latimer, originally. I go where they tell me.’

  ‘Alright, Latimer. They’re not short on ruins either. Jesus, every fucking world we’ve colonised belonged to them once. We’ve got their charts to thank for being out here in the first place.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sutjiadi stopped dead and swung on me with the closest thing I’d seen to true emotion on his face since he’d lost the tussle over blasting the rockfall away from the gate. ‘Exactly. And you want to know what that means?’

  I leaned back, surprised by the sudden intensity. ‘Yeah, sure. Tell me.’

  ‘It means we shouldn’t be out here, Kovacs.’ He was speaking in a low, urgent voice I hadn’t heard him use before. ‘We don’t belong here. We’re not ready. It’s a stupid fucking mistake that we stumbled onto the astrogation charts in the first place. Under our own steam, it would have taken us thousands of years to find these planets and colonise them. We needed that time, Kovacs. We needed to earn our place in interstellar space. Instead we got out here bootstrapping ourselves on a dead civilisation we don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  He trampled the objection down. ‘Look at how long it’s taken the archaeologue to open that gate. Look at all the half-understood scraps we’ve depended on to come this far. We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do.’ He mimicked Wardani savagely. ‘She’s got no idea, and neither does anyone else. We’re guessing. We have no idea what we’re doing, Kovacs. We wander around out here, nailing our little anthropomorphic certainties to the cosmos and whistling in the dark, but the truth is we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing. We shouldn’t be out here at all. We do not belong here.’

  I pushed out a long breath.

  ‘Well. Sutjiadi.’ I looked at ground and sky in turn. ‘You’d better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a shithole, of course, but it’s where we’re from. We sure as hell belong there.’

  He smiled a little, rearguard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.

  �
�It’s too late for that,’ he said quietly. ‘Much too late for that.’

  Down by the Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device’s ability to do the job.

  ‘Look,’ said Hansen irritably, as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. ‘It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it’s patterned the trace, there’s nothing short of a dark body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there’s no problem.’

  ‘That isn’t impossible,’ Hand told him. ‘Run the mass detector back-up again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.’

  Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-metre buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

  Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini’s hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.

  ‘All ready for the Big Deep,’ he said.

  With the launch cradle assembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping’s help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then round in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it and yawned.

  ‘Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?’ he asked.

  I checked my retinal time display, where I’d synchronised a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy’s nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.

  ‘Oh for Samedi’s sake,’ said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. ‘Well don’t just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me—’

  She ripped apart.

  I was closest, already turning to answer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upwards in a careless back-and-forth scribble and tossed the pieces skywards in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of total body gymnast’s trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.

  I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word no, torn loose of its meaning.

  Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.

  I could see

  Yells from the Nagini.

  the thing

  Someone cut loose with a blaster.

  that did it.

  Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of a half dozen, pale grey and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.

  They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.

  The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen trod past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.

  ‘Get back!’ I screamed at him. ‘Get the fuck back!’

  The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.

  Too late.

  Hansen must have thought he was up against armouring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He’d spread his beam to beat the latter and was closing to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporises.

  The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to glass in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.

  I walked in, firing.

  The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometre precision.

  Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

  I emptied both guns.

  They spat out their magazines and gaped open, eagerly. I pounded the butts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun butts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

  The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chef’s knife.

  I emptied again.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  Reloaded.

  Emptied.

  And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

  I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank’s head looking up at me.

  It had fallen face up on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she was going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

  The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

  I dropped my arms.

  The bar.

  My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me.

  In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side.

  ‘Get me a corrosion grenade,’ I said, and my voice was unrecognisable in my own ears.

  The Nagini held station, three metres above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

  The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the Nagini’s holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand’s insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

  The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor p
anels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of—

  Stop that.

  Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

  Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation and deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser sealed at the neck and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human shaped.

  Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalised anything non-organic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank’s weapons either.

  I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

  On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping’s microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

  ‘Take a look.’ Sun glanced round at me, and cleared her throat. ‘It’s what you said.’

  ‘Then I don’t need to look.’

  ‘You’re saying these are the nanobes?’ asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. ‘Not—’

  ‘The gate isn’t even fucking open, Sutjiadi.’ I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

  Sun peered again into the microscope’s screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.