“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Roespinoedji, as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. “I’ll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.”
The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognisable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit Open Ground that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic sub-orgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.
Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up station near the elevator, shrugged and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there
“Told you,” said Schneider to me. “If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He’s interfaced with every player in Landfall.”
“You mean he was before the war.”
Schneider shook his head. “Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn’t still jacked into the machine.”
“If he’s jacked into the machine,” I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, “how come he’s living in this shithole town?”
“Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now that’s a shithole.”
Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn’t.
“Let’s wait,” I said softly. “It’s only polite.”
He snorted. “What do you think; he’s going to poison us? What for? There’s no angle in it.”
But he left the food alone.
The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitised, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, rebel operations neutralised.
Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.
“Ivanna and Kas,” he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. “My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn’t you say? Or two. Now,” he snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself in an adjacent sofa. “To business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?”
“You’re not eating?” I asked him.
“Oh.” He smiled and gestured at his two companions. “Well, they are, and I’m really very fond of both of them.”
Schneider looked embarrassed.
“No?” Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. “There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?”
“We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.” Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. “Knockdown price.”
“Indeed?”
“Yeah—call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-70, very little wear and no previous owner of record.”
Roespinoedji smiled. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Check it if you like.” Schneider swallowed his mouthful. “The datacore’s wiped cleaner than your tax records, six hundred thousand klick range. Universal config, hard space, suborbital, submarine. Handles like a whorehouse harpy.”
“Yes, I seem to remember the seventies were impressive. Or was it you that told me that, Jan?” The boy stroked his beardless chin in a gesture that clearly belonged to a previous sleeve. “Never mind. This knockdown bargain comes armed, I assume.”
Schneider nodded, chewing. “Micromissile turret, nose-mounted. Plus evasion systems. Full autodefensive software, very nice package.”
I coughed on a pastry.
The two women drifted over to the sofa where Roespinoedji sat and arranged themselves in decorative symmetry on either side of him. Neither of them had said a word or made a sound that I could detect since they walked in. The woman on Roespinoedji’s left began to feed him from her plate. He leaned back against her and eyed me speculatively while he chewed what she gave him.
“Alright,” he said finally. “Six million.”
“UN?” asked Schneider, and Roespinoedji laughed out loud.
“Saft. Six million saft.”
The Standard Archaeological Find Token, created back when the Sanction government was still little more than a global claims administrator, and now an unpopular global currency whose performance against the Latimer franc it had replaced was reminiscent of a swamp panther trying to climb a fricfree-treated dock ramp. There were currently about two hundred and thirty saft to the Protectorate (UN) dollar.
Schneider was aghast, his haggler’s soul outraged. “You cannot be serious, Djoko. Even six million UN’s only about half what it’s worth. It’s a Wu Morrison, man.”
“Does it have cryocaps?”
“Uhhh… No.”
“So what the fuck use is it to me, Jan?” Roespinoedji asked without heat. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right, and she passed him a wineglass without a word. “Look, at this precise moment the only use anyone outside the military has for a space rig is as a means of lifting out of here, beating the blockade and getting back to Latimer. That six-hundred-thousand-kilometre range can be modified by someone who knows what they’re doing, and the Wu Morrisons have goodish guidance systems, I know, but at the speed you’ll get out of an ISN-70, especially backyard customised, it’s still the best part of three decades back to Latimer. You need cryocapsules for that.” He held up a hand to forestall Schneider’s protest. “And I don’t know anyone, anyone, who can get cryocaps. Not for cunt nor credit. The Landfall Cartel know what they’re about, Jan, and they’ve got it all welded shut. No one gets out of here alive—not until the war’s over. That’s the deal.”
“You can always sell to the Kempists,” I said. “They’re pretty desperate for the hardware, they’ll pay.”
Roespinoedji nodded. “Yes, Mr. Kovacs, they will pay, and they’ll pay in saft. Because it’s all they’ve got. Your friends in the Wedge have seen to that.”
“Not my friends. I’m just wearing this.”
“Rather well, though.”
I shrugged.
“What about ten,” said Schneider hopefully. “Kemp’s paying five times that for reconditioned suborbitals.”
Roespinoedji sighed. “Yes, and in the meantime I have to hide it somewhere, and pay off anyone who sees it. It’s not a dune scooter, you know. Then I have to make contact with the Kempists, which as you may be aware carries a mandatory erasure penalty these days. I have to arrange a covert meeting, oh and with armed back-up in case these toy revolutionaries decide to requisition my merchandise instead of paying up. Which they often do if you don’t come heavy. Look at the logistics, Jan. I’m doing you a favour, just taking it off your hands. Who else were you going to go to?”
“Eight—”
“Six is fine,” I cut in swiftly. “And we appreciate the favour. But how about you sweeten our end with a ride into Landfall and a little free information? Just to show we’re all friends.”
The boy’s gaze sharpened and he glanced towards Tanya Wardani.
“Free information, eh?” He raised his eyebrows, twi
ce in quick succession, clownishly. “Of course there’s really no such thing, you know. But just to show we’re all friends. What do you want to know?”
“Landfall.” I said. “Outside of the Cartel, who are the razorfish? I’m talking about second-rank corporates, maybe even third rank. Who’s tomorrow’s shiny new dream at the moment?”
Roespinoedji sipped meditatively at his wine. “Hmm. Razorfish. I don’t believe we have any of those on Sanction IV. Or Latimer, come to that.”
“I’m from Harlan’s World.”
“Oh, really. Not a Quellist, I assume.” He gestured at the Wedge uniform. “Given your current political alignment, I mean.”
“You don’t want to oversimplify Quellism. Kemp keeps quoting her, but like most people he’s selective.”
“Well, I really wouldn’t know.” Roespinoedji put up one hand to block the next piece of food his concubine was readying for him. “But your razorfish. I’d say you’ve got a half dozen at most. Late arrivals, most of them Latimer-based. The interstellars blocked out most of the local competition until about twenty years ago. And now of course they’ve got the Cartel and the government in their pocket. There’s not much more than scraps for everybody else. Most of the third rank are getting ready to go home; they can’t really afford the war.” He stroked at his imagined beard. “Second rank, well… Sathakarn Yu Associates maybe, PKN, the Mandrake Corporation. They’re all pretty carnivorous. Might be a couple more I can dig out for you. Are you planning to approach these people with something?”
I nodded. “Indirectly.”
“Yes, well, some free advice to go with your free information, then. Feed it to them on a long stick.” Roespinoedji raised his glass towards me and then drained it. He smiled affably. “Because if you don’t, they’ll take your hand off at the shoulder.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Like a lot of cities that owe their existence to a spaceport, Landfall had no real centre. Instead it sprawled haphazardly across a broad semi-desert plain in the southern hemisphere where the original colony barges had touched down a century ago. Each corporation holding stock in the venture had simply built its own landing field somewhere on the plain and surrounded it with a ring of ancillary structures. In time those rings had spread outwards, met each other and eventually merged into a warren of acentric conurbation with only the vaguest of overall planning to link it all together. Secondary investors moved in, renting or buying space from the primaries and carving themselves niches in both the market and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Meanwhile, other cities arose elsewhere on the globe, but the Export Quarantine clause in the Charter ensured that all the wealth generated by Sanction IVs archaeological industries had at some point to pass through Landfall. Gorged on an unrestricted diet of artefact export, land allocation and dig licensing, the former spaceport had swelled to monstrous proportions. It now covered two-thirds of the plain and, with twelve million inhabitants, was home to almost thirty per cent of what was left of Sanction IVs total population.
It was a pit.
I walked with Schneider through badly-kept streets full of urban detritus and reddish desert sand. The air was hot and dry and the shade cast by the blocks on either side provided little respite from the high-angled rays of the sun. I could feel sweat beading on my face and soaking the hair at the back of my neck. In windows and mirror-shielded frontages along the way, our black-uniformed reflections kept pace. I was almost glad of the company. There was no one else out in the midday heat and the shimmering stillness of it was uncanny. The sand crunched audibly underfoot.
The place we were looking for wasn’t hard to find. It stuck up at the edge of the district like a burnished bronze conning tower, double the height of the surrounding blocks and utterly featureless from the outside. Like much of the architecture in Landfall, it was mirror-surfaced and the reflected sun made its edges difficult to look at directly. It wasn’t the tallest tower in Landfall, but the structure had a raw power to it that throbbed across the surrounding urban sprawl and spoke volumes about its designers.
Testing the human frame to destruction
The phrase flopped out of my memory like a corpse from a closet.
“How close you want to get?” asked Schneider nervously.
“A bit closer.”
The Khumalo sleeve, like all Carrera’s Wedge custom, had a satdata locational display wired in as standard and reckoned to be quite user-friendly when not fucked up by the webs of jamming and counter-jamming that currently swathed most of Sanction IV. Blinked up to focus now, it gave me a mesh of streets and city blocks covering my whole left field of vision. Two tagged dots pulsed minutely on a thoroughfare.
Testing the—
I overcued the tightlock fractionally and the view dizzied up until I was looking at the top of my own head from block-top height.
“Shit.”
“What?” Beside me, Schneider had tensed up in what he obviously imagined was a stance of ninja combat readiness. Behind his sunlenses, he looked comically worried.
Testing—
“Forget it.” I scaled back up until the tower re-emerged on the edge of the display. A shortest-possible route lit up obligingly in yellow, threading us to the building through a pair of intersections. “This way.”
Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines
A couple of minutes down the yellow line, one of the streets gave onto a narrow suspension bridge over a dry canal. The bridge sloped upward slightly along its twenty-metre length to meet a raised concrete flange on the far side. Two other bridges paralleled the crossing a hundred metres down on either side, also sloping upward. The floor of the canal bore a scattering of the debris any urban area will breed—discarded domestic devices spilling circuitry from cracked casings, emptied food packages and sun-bleached knots of cloth that reminded me of machine-gunned bodies. Over it all and on the other side of this dumping ground, the tower waited.
Testing the human
Schneider hovered on the threshold of the bridge.
“You going across?”
“Yeah, and so are you. We’re partners, remember.” I shoved him lightly in the small of the back and followed up so close he’d have to go on. There was a slightly hysterical good humour brewing in me as the Envoy conditioning strove to fend off the unsubtle doses of combat prep hormones my sleeve sensed were required.
“I just don’t think this is—”
“If anything goes wrong, you can blame me.” I nudged him again. “Now come on.”
“If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dead,” he muttered morosely.
“Yeah, at least.”
We crossed, Schneider holding onto the rails as if the bridge were swaying in a high wind.
The flange on the other side turned out to be the edge of a featureless fifty-metre access plaza. We stood two metres in, looking up at the impassive face of the tower. Whether intentionally or not, whoever had built the concrete apron around the building’s base had created a perfect killing field. There was no cover in any direction and the only retreat was back along the slim, exposed bridge or a bone-shattering jump into the empty canal.
“Open ground, all around,” sang Schneider under his breath, picking up on the cadence and lyrics of the Kempist revolutionary hymn of the same name. I couldn’t blame him. I’d caught myself humming the fucking thing a couple of times since we got into the unjammed airspace around the city—the Lapinee version was everywhere, close enough to the Kempist original to activate recall from last year. Back then, you could hear the original playing on the Rebel’s propaganda channels whenever and wherever the government jamming went down. Telling the—apparently edifying—story of a doomed platoon of volunteers holding a position against overwhelming odds for love of Joshua Kemp and his revolution, the anthem was sung against a catchy junk salsa backdrop that tended to stick in your head. Most of my men in the Northern Rim assault force could sing it by heart, and often did, to the fury of Cartel pol
itical officers, who were mostly too scared of the Wedge uniforms to make something of it.
In fact, the melody had proven so virulently memetic that even the most solidly pro-corporate citizens were unable to resist absent-mindedly humming it. This, plus a network of Cartel informers working on a commission-only basis, was enough to ensure that penal facilities all over Sanction IV were soon overflowing with musically-inclined political offenders. In view of the strain this put on policing, an expensive consulting team was called in and rapidly came up with a new set of sanitised lyrics to fit the original melody. Lapinee, a construct vocalist, was designed and launched to front the replacement song, which told the story of a young boy, orphaned in a Kempist sneak raid but then adopted by a kindly corporate bloc and brought up to realise his full potential as a top-level planetary executive.
As a ballad, it lacked the romantic blood and glory elements of the original, but since certain of the Kempist lyrics had been mirrored with malice aforethought, people generally lost track of which song was which and just sang a mangled hybrid of both, sewn together with much salsa-based humming. Any revolutionary sentiments got thoroughly scrambled in the process. The consulting team got a bonus, plus spin-off royalties from Lapinee, who was currently being plugged on all state channels. An album was in the offing.
Schneider stopped his humming. “Think they’ve got it covered?”
“Reckon so.” I nodded towards the base of the tower, where burnished doors fully five metres high apparently gave access. The massive portal was flanked by two plinths on which stood examples of abstract art each worthy of the title Eggs Collide in Symmetry or—I racked up the neurachem to be sure—Overkill Hardware Semi-deployed.
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