She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.
I left her alone amidst the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I’d taken to hold it down. There was grey light filtering through the bubblefab’s dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen…
Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see?
Semetaire?
I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider towelling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.
“Morning,” he frothed.
“Morning.” I propped myself upright. “What time is it?”
“Little after five.” He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. “Wouldn’t be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I’m a light sleeper.”
I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.
“Fucking psycho,” I grumbled.
“Hey, he’s in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.”
“Yeah, but Jiang’s the only one with insomnia, it appears.” I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it manifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.
Rush/snap!
“Haiii!!!”
“Right.”
I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. “I’m awake now. You finished with that brush?”
Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life and stepped into the shower niche.
Rise and shine.
Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clear-headed, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swivelling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the ‘fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.
I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab and sipped, watching.
“Was there something?” Jiang asked, as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he’d razored the Maori sleeve’s thick dark hair back to an even two centimetres all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.
“You do this every morning?”
“Yes.” The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.
“Impressive.”
“Necessary.” Another death blow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. “Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.”
I nodded. “Hayashi.”
The patterns slowed fractionally.
“You have read him?”
“Met him once.”
Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. “You met Toru Hayashi?”
“I’m older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.”
“You are an Envoy?”
“Was.”
For a moment, he seemed unsure what to say. I wondered if he thought I was joking. Then he brought his arms forward, sheathed his right fist at chest height in the cup of his left hand and bowed slightly over the grasp.
“Takeshi-san, if I offended you with my talk of fear yesterday, I apologise. I am a fool.”
“No problem. I wasn’t offended. We all deal with it different ways. You planning on breakfast?”
He pointed across the living space to where the table had been pushed back to the canvasynth wall. There was fresh fruit piled on a shallow bowl and what looked like slices of rye bread.
“Mind if I join you?”
“I would be. Honoured.”
We were still eating when Schneider came back from wherever he’d been for the last twenty minutes.
“Meeting in the main ‘fab,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing into the dormitory. He emerged a minute later. “Fifteen minutes. Sutjiadi seems to think everyone should be there.”
He was gone again.
Jiang was half to his feet when I put out a hand and gestured him back to his seat.
“Take it easy. He said fifteen minutes.”
“I wish to shower and change,” said Jiang, a little stiffly.
“I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Finish your breakfast, for Christ’s sake. In a couple of days from now it’ll make you sick to the stomach just to swallow food. Enjoy the flavours while you can.”
He sat back down with a strange expression on his face.
“Do you mind, Takeshi-san, if I ask you a question?”
“Why am I no longer an Envoy?” I saw the confirmation in his eyes. “Call it an ethical revelation. I was at Innenin.”
“I have read about it.”
“Hayashi again?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, well, Hayashi’s account is pretty close, but he wasn’t there. That’s why he comes off ambiguous about the whole thing. Didn’t feel fit to judge. I was there, and I’m eminently fit to judge. They fucked us. No one’s too clear on whether they actually intended to or not, but I’m here to tell you that doesn’t matter. My friends died—really died—when there was no need. That’s what counts.”
“Yet, as a soldier, surely you must—”
“Jiang, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I try not to think of myself as a soldier any more. I’m trying to evolve.”
“Then what do you consider yourself?” His voice stayed polite, but his demeanour had tightened and his food was forgotten on his plate. “What have you evolved into?”
I shrugged. “Difficult to say. Something better, at any rate. A paid killer, maybe?”
The whites of his eyes flared. I sighed.
“I’m sorry if that offends you, Jiang, but it’s the truth. You probably don’t want to hear it, most soldiers don’t. When you put on that uniform, you’re saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.”
“That is Quellism.” He all but reared back from the table as he said it.
“Maybe. That doesn’t stop it being true.” I couldn’t quite work out why I was bothering with this man. Maybe it was something about his ninja calm, the way it begged to be shattered. Or maybe it was just being woken up early by his tightly controlled killing dance. “Jiang, ask yourself, what are you going to do when your superior officer orders you to plasma-bomb some hospital full of injured children?”
“There are certain actions—”
“No!” The snap in my own voice surprised me. “Soldiers don’t get to make those kinds of choices. Look out the window, Jiang. Mixed in with that black stuff you see blowing around out there, there’s a thin coating of fat molecules that used to be people. Men, women, children, all vaporised by some soldier under orders from some superior officer. Because they were in the way.”
“That was a Kempist action.”
“Oh, please.”
“I would not carry out—”
“Then you’re no longer a soldier, Jiang. Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldie
r. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”
He got up.
“I am going to change,” he said coldly. “Please present my apologies to Captain Sutjiadi for the delay.”
“Sure.” I picked up a kiwi fruit from the table and bit through the skin. “See you there.”
I watched him retreat to the other dormitory, then got up from the table and wandered out into the morning, still chewing the furred bitterness of the kiwi skin amidst the fruit.
Outside, the camp was coming slowly to life. On my way to the assembly ‘fab I spotted Ameli Vongsavath crouched under one of the Nagini’s support struts while Yvette Cruickshank helped her lift part of the hydraulic system clear for inspection. With Wardani bunking in her lab, the three remaining females had ended up sharing a ‘fab, whether by accident or design I didn’t know. None of the male team members had tried for the fourth bunk.
Cruickshank saw me and waved.
“Sleep well?” I called out.
She grinned back. “Like the fucking dead.”
Hand was waiting at the door to the assembly ‘fab, the clean angles of his face freshly shaven, the chameleochrome coveralls immaculate. There was a faint tang of spice in the air that I thought might come from something on his hair. He looked so much like a net ad for officer training that I could cheerfully have shot him in the face as soon as said good morning.
“Morning.”
“Good morning, lieutenant. How did you sleep?”
“Briefly.”
Inside, three-quarters of the space was given over to the assembly hall, the rest walled off for Hand’s use. In the assembly space, a dozen memoryboard-equipped chairs had been set out in an approximate ring and Sutjiadi was busy with a map projector, spinning up a table-sized central image of the beach and surroundings, punching in tags and making notes on his own chair’s board. He looked up as I came in.
“Kovacs, good. If you’ve got no objections, I’m going to send you out on the bike with Sun this morning.”
I yawned. “Sounds like fun.”
“Yes, well that isn’t the primary purpose. I want to string a secondary ring of remotes a few kilometres back to give us a response edge, and while Sun’s doing that she can’t be watching her own ass. You get the turret duty. I’ll have Hansen and Cruickshank start at the north end and swing inland. You and Sun go south, do the same thing.” He gave me a thin smile. “See if you can’t arrange to meet somewhere in the middle.”
I nodded.
“Humour.” I took a seat and slumped in it. “You want to watch that, Sutjiadi. Stuff’s addictive.”
Up on the seaward slopes of Dangrek’s spine, the devastation at Sauberville was clearer. You could see where the fireball had blasted a cavity into the hook at the end of the peninsula and let the sea in, changing the whole shape of the coastline. Around the crater, smoke was still crawling into the sky, but from up here you could make out the myriad tiny fires that fed the flow, dull red like the beacons used to flag potential flashpoints on a political map.
Of the buildings, the city itself, there was nothing left at all.
“You’ve got to hand it to Kemp,” I said, mostly to the wind coming in off the sea, “he doesn’t mess about with decision-making by committee. There’s no bigger picture with this guy. Soon as it looks like he’s losing, bam! He just calls in the angelfire.”
“Sorry?” Sun Liping was still engrossed in the innards of the sentry system we had just planted. “You talking to me?”
“Not really.”
“Then you were talking to yourself?” Her brows arched over her work. “That’s a bad sign, Kovacs.”
I grunted and shifted in the gunner’s saddle. The grav bike was canted at an angle on the rough grass, mounted Sunjets cranked down to maintain a level bead on the landward horizon. They twitched from time to time, motion trackers chasing the wind through the grass or maybe some small animal that had somehow managed not to die when the blast hit Sauberville.
“Alright, we’re done.” Sun closed up the inspection hatch and stood back, watching the turret reel drunkenly to its feet and turn to face the mountains. It firmed up as the ultravibe battery snicked out of the upper carapace, as if it suddenly recalled its purpose in life. The hydraulic system settled it into a squat that took the bulk of the body below line of sight for anyone coming up this particular ridge. A fairweather sensor crept out of the armour below the gun segment and flexed in the air. The whole machine looked absurdly like a starved frog in hiding, testing the air with one especially emaciated foreleg.
I chinned the contact mike.
“Cruickshank, this is Kovacs. You paying attention?”
“Nothing but.” The rapid deployment commando came back laconic. “Where you at, Kovacs?”
“We have number six fed and watered. Moving on to site five. We should have line of sight on you soon. Make sure you keep your tags where they can be read.”
“Relax, will you? I do this for a living.”
“That didn’t save you last time, did it?”
I heard her snort. “Low blow, man. Low blow. How many times you been dead anyway, Kovacs?”
“A few,” I admitted.
“So.” Her voice rose derisively. “Shut the fuck up.”
“See you soon, Cruickshank.”
“Not if I get you in my sights first. Out.”
Sun climbed aboard the bike.
“She likes you,” she said over her shoulder. “Just for your information. Ameli and I spent most of last night hearing what she’d like to do to you in a locked escape pod.”
“Good to know. You weren’t sworn to secrecy then?”
Sun fired up the motors and the wind shield snipped shut around us. “I think,” she said meditatively, “the idea was that one of us would tell you as soon as possible. Her family are from the Limon Highlands back on Latimer, and from what I hear the Limon girls don’t mess about when they want something plugging in.” She turned to look at me. “Her choice of words, not mine.”
I grinned.
“Of course she’ll need to hurry,” Sun went on, busying herself with the controls. “In a few days none of us’ll have any libido left worth talking about.”
I lost the grin.
We lifted and coasted slowly along the seaward side of the ridge. The grav bike was a comfortable ride, even weighed down with loaded panniers, and with the wind screen on, conversation was easy.
“Do you think the archaeologue can open the gate as she claims?” Sun asked.
“If anyone can.”
“If anyone can,” she repeated thoughtfully.
I thought about the psychodynamic repairs I had done on Wardani, the bruised interior landscape I had had to open up, peeling it back like bandaging that had gone septic and stiffened into the flesh beneath. And there at the core, the tightly wired centredness that had allowed her to survive the damage.
She had wept when the opening took hold, but she cried wide-eyed, like someone fighting the weight of drowsiness, blinking the tears out of her eyes, hands clenched into fists at her sides, teeth gritted.
I woke her up, but she brought herself back.
“Scratch that,” I said. “She can do it. No question.”
“You show remarkable faith.” There was no criticism in Sun’s voice that I could hear. “Strange in a man who works so hard at burying himself beneath the weight of disbelief.”
“It isn’t faith,” I said shortly. “It’s knowledge. There’s a big difference.”
“Yet I understand Envoy conditioning provides insights that readily transform the one into the other.”
“Who told you I was an Envoy?”
“You did.” This time I thought I could detect a smile in Sun’s voice. “Well, at least, you told Deprez, and I was listening.”
“Very astute of you.”
“Thank you. Is my information accurate then?”
“Not really, no. Where did you hear it?”
“My family is originally from Hun Home. There, we have a Chinese name for the Envoys.” She made a short string of tightly sung syllables. “It means One who makes Facts from Belief.”
I grunted. I’d heard something similar on New Beijing a couple of decades ago. Most of the colonial cultures have built myths around the Envoys at one time or another.
“You sound unimpressed.”
“Well, it’s a bad translation. What the Envoys have is just an intuition enhancement system. You know. You’re going out, it’s not a bad day but you take a jacket on impulse. Later it rains. How does that work?”
She looked over her shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. “Luck?”
“Could be luck. But what’s more likely is that systems in your mind and body that you’re not aware of measure the environment at some subconscious level and just occasionally manage to squirt the message through all the superego programming. Envoy training takes that and refines it so your superego and subconscious get along better. It’s nothing to do with belief, it’s just a sense of something underlying. You make the connections and from that you can assemble a skeleton model of the truth. Later on, you go back and fill in the gaps. Gifted detectives have been doing it for centuries unaided. This is just the superamped version.” Suddenly I was tired of the words coming out of my mouth, the glib flow of human systems specs that you could wrap yourself in to escape the emotional realities of what you did for a living. “So tell me, Sun. How did you get from Hun Home to here?”
“Not me, my parents. They were contract biosystems analysts. They came here on the needlecast when the Hun Home cooperatives bought into settling Sanction IV. Their personalities, I mean. DHF’d into custom-grown clones from Sino stock on Latimer. All part of the deal.”
“Are they still here?”
She hunched her shoulders slightly. “No. They retired to Latimer several years ago. The settlement contract paid very well.”
“You didn’t want to go with them?”
“I was born on Sanction IV. This is my home.” Sun looked back at me again. “I imagine you have a problem understanding that.”
“Not really. I’ve seen worse places to belong.”
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