‘Could they have done that?’
‘Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.’ She shrugged. ‘Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing fucking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government channels, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Cant, political theory, all to shore up the use of a planetary massacre machine. And I’d given it to them. Without me, I don’t think they could have got the gate open again. They were just Scratchers. They needed me. They couldn’t get anyone else, the Guild Masters were all already on their way back to Latimer in cryocap liners, way ahead of the game, or holed up in Landfall waiting for their Guild-paid hypercasts to come through. Weng and Aribowo came looking for me in Indigo City. They begged me to help them. And I did.’ There was something like a plea in her face as she turned to look at me. ‘I gave it to them.’
‘But you took it away again,’ I said gently.
Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.
‘Were you planning to do the same to us?’ I asked, when she seemed to have calmed. She tried to withdraw her hand, but I held onto it.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said urgently. ‘These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.’
A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I was just surviving.’
‘Good enough,’ I told her.
We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.
Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.
I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.
‘I hope he doesn’t come here,’ she muttered.
‘Sorry?’
‘Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.’
‘Will they let him come?’
She shrugged. ‘Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the running himself.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’ll kill him. His precious Martians, fighting and dying in cohorts just like humans. Mass graves and planetary wealth condensed into war machines. It tears down everything he wanted to believe about them.’
‘Well, predator stock . . .’
‘I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old fucking song.’
‘Same old fucking universe,’ I pointed out gently.
‘It’s just . . .’
‘At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.’
‘Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?’
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. ‘They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like running from a bomb blast. Like putting your hands out to stop a bullet.’
‘And then the hull what, melted?’
She shook her head again, slowly. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,’ she gestured, ‘I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.’
I shivered a little, remembering.
‘It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,’ she went on. ‘What we saw didn’t come close.’
I grunted. ‘Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?’
‘No.’
‘He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.’
She stopped in the street to look at me.
‘Look, if it did . . .’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought.’
‘We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.’
‘It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.’
‘Statistically,’ she breathed.
‘Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?’
‘Astronomical.’
‘And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.’
‘Unless.’
I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.
‘That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.’
‘We would have seen it,’ she said uncertainly. ‘By now, we would have spotted some of them.’
‘Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.’
She laughed, or something very like it.
‘You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.’
I built another smile. ‘No. I’m not Wycinski, either.’
The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.
‘Yeah?’
‘Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.’
I looked at Wardani and sighed. ‘Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.’
I pocketed the phone and started down the st
reet again. Wardani followed.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr I’m-Not-Wycinski?’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.’
‘Yes.’
The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.
She’d be alright.
It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.
It felt like a scab coming off.
‘One thing,’ I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.
‘Yeah?’
‘What do you want me to do with your share of the money?’
She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.
‘Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.’
‘Right.’
Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.
EPILOGUE
The Angin Chandra’s Virtue blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She’s already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualise, but even that’s pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she’ll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She’s not a deep space vessel, she’s not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she’ll get where she’s going in her own time.
Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji’s contractors have done us proud. There’s a shoreline in wind-and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water’s edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sunblasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five metres of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicoloured fish down there, in amongst the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortification.
The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there’s enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoracion and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.
During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evenings, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you’re going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn’t any night sky you’d see from the pilot deck of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue right now - one of the contractors told me they’ve drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.
As afterlives go, it’s not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect - not nearly restricted enough entry for one thing - but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the Tanya Wardani are locked into. If the ’Chandra’s deserted decks and corridors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it’s an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.
But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them are interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.
Sutjiadi didn’t make it either. His stack was the only one I didn’t turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn’t know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all of our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.
Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they re-sleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I’m buying.
Sutjiadi.
Cruickshank.
Hansen.
Jiang.
Some would say we got off lightly.
Sometimes, when I’m sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whisky, I almost agree.
Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly-dressed construct modelled after a Hun Home Settlement Years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She’s rarely gone more than half an hour.
Of course in real time, that’s a couple of days. Roespinoedji’s contractors slowed the onboard virtuality down for us, about as far as it would go. It must have been some kind of a first for them - most clients want virtual time running at tens or hundreds of times reality standard. But then most people don’t have a decade and more with nothing better to do than sit around. We’re living out the eleven year transit in here at about a hundred times the speed it’s really passing. Weeks on the ’Chandra’s shadow-crewed bridge pass in hours for us. We’ll be back in the Latimer system by the end of the month.
It really would have been easier to just sleep through it, but Carrera was no worse a judge of human nature than any of the other carrion birds gathered about the paralysed body of Sanction IV. Like all vessels with potential to escape the war, the battlewagon is grudgingly equipped with a single emergency cryocap for the pilot. It isn’t even a very good one - most of Vongsavath’s time away is taken up with the de- and refrosting time required by the overcomplex cryosystems. That Hun Home bureaucrat is an elaborate joke on Sun Liping’s part, suggested and then written into the format when Vongsavath returned one evening spitting curses at the inefficiency of the cryocap’s processor.
Vongsavath exaggerates, of course, the way you do about minor annoyances when life is so close to perfect in its major aspects. Most of the time she’s not gone long enough for her coffee to get cold, and the systems checks she performs on the pilot deck have so far proved one hundred
per cent superfluous. Nuhanovic guidance systems. Like Sun once said, in the hull of the Martian ship, they don’t build the stuff any better than this.
I mentioned that comment to her a couple of days ago as we lay floating on our backs in the long aquamarine swells out beyond the headland, eyes slitted against the sun overhead. She could barely remember saying it. Everything that happened on Sanction IV is already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. In the afterlife, you lose track of time, it seems, or maybe you just no longer have the need or desire to keep track. Any one of us could find out from the virtuality datahead how long we’ve been gone, when exactly we’ll arrive, but it seems none of us want to. We prefer to keep it vague. Back on Sanction IV, we know, years have already passed, but exactly how many seems - and probably is - irrelevant. The war may already be over, the peace already being fought over. Or it may not. It’s hard to make it matter more than that. The living do not touch us here.
For the most part, anyway.
Occasionally, though, I wonder what Tanya Wardani might be doing by now. I wonder if she is already out on the edges of the Sanction system somewhere, turning the face of some new sleeve tired and intent as she pores over the glyph locks on a Martian dreadnought. I wonder how many other deadwired hulks there are spinning around out there, whirling up to trade fire with their ancient enemies and then falling away injured into the night again, machines creeping out to soothe and repair and make ready for the next time. I wonder what else we’re going to come across in those unexpectedly crowded skies, once we start looking. And then, occasionally, I wonder what they were all doing there in the first place. I wonder what they were fighting for in the space around that nondescript little star and I wonder if in the end they thought it was worth it.
Even more occasionally, I turn my mind to what I have to do when we do get to Latimer, but the detail seems unreal. The Quellists will want a report. They’ll want to know why I couldn’t twist Kemp closer to their designs for the whole Latimer sector, why I changed sides at the critical moment, and worst of all, why I left things no better aligned than they were when they needlecast me in. It’s probably not what they had in mind when they hired me.
The Complete SF Collection Page 98