“Really?”
“Sure. Sharya for one. Right! Go right!”
The bike dipped and banked. Admirable responses from Sun in her new sleeve. I shifted in my saddle, scanning the hillscape. My hands went to the flying grips of the mounted Sunjet set and jerked it down to manual height. On the move it wasn’t much good as an automated weapon without some very careful programming and we hadn’t had time for that.
“There’s something moving out there.” I chinned the mike. “Cruickshank, we’ve got movement across here. Want to join the party?”
The reply crisped back. “On our way. Stay tagged.”
“Can you see it?” asked Sun.
“If I could see it, I’d have shot it. What about the scope?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“I think…” We crested a hillock and Sun’s voice came back, cursing, by the sound of it, in Mandarin. She booted the bike sideways and swung about, creeping up another metre from the ground. Peering down over her shoulder, I saw what we’d been looking for.
“What the fuck is that?” I whispered.
On another scale, I might have thought I was looking at a recently hatched nest of the bio-engineered maggots they use for cleaning wounds. The grey mass that writhed on the grass below us had the same slick-wet consistency and self-referential motion, like a million microscopic pairs of hands washing themselves and each other. But there would have been enough maggots here for every wound inflicted on Sanction IV in the last month. We were looking at a sphere of seething activity over a metre across, pushed gently about on the hillside like a gas-filled balloon. Where the shadow of the bike fell across it, bulges formed on the surface and bulked upwards, bursting like blisters with a soft popping and falling back into the substance of the main body.
“Look,” said Sun quietly. “It likes us.”
“What the fuck is it?”
“I didn’t know the first time you asked me.”
She nudged the bike back to the slope we’d just crested, and put us down. I lowered the Sunjet discharge channels to focus on our new playmate.
“Do you think this is far enough away?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said grimly. “If it even twitches this way, I’m going to blast it apart on general principles. Whatever it is.”
“That strikes me as unsophisticated.”
“Yeah, well. Just call me Sutjiadi.”
The thing, whatever it was, seemed to have calmed down now we no longer cast a shadow on its surface. The internal writhing motion went on, but there was no sign of a coordinated lateral move in our direction. I leaned on the Sunjet mounting and watched, wondering briefly if we weren’t somehow still back in the Mandrake construct, looking at another probability dysfunction like the grey cloud that had obscured Sauberville while its fate was still undecided.
A dull droning reached my ears.
“Here come the blam blam crew.” I scanned the ridge northward, spotted the other bike and neurachem’d a close-up. Cruickshank’s hair bannered out against the sky from her perch behind the weaponry. They had the windscreen powered back to a driver’s cone for speed. Hansen drove hunched forward into it, intent. I was surprised at the warm rush the sight kicked off inside me.
Wolf gene splice, I registered irritably. Never shake it.
Good old Carrera. Never misses a trick, the old bastard.
“We should ‘cast this back to Hand,” Sun was saying. “The Cartel archives may have something on it.”
Carrera’s voice drifted through my mind.
the Cartel have deployed
I looked back at the seething grey mass with new eyes.
Fuck.
Hansen brought the bike to a juddering halt alongside us and leaned on the handlebars. His brow furrowed.
“Wha—”
“We don’t know what the fuck it is,” Sun broke in tartly.
“Yes we do,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Hand looked impassively at the projected image for a long moment after Sun froze the film. No one else was looking at the holodisplay any more. Seated in the ring, or crowding in at the bubblefab’s door, they were looking at him.
“Nanotech, right?” Hansen said it for everyone.
Hand nodded. His face was a mask, but to the Envoy-tuned senses I had deployed, the anger came smoking off him in waves.
“Experimental nanotech,” I said. “I thought that was a standard scare line, Hand. Nothing to worry about.”
“It usually is,” he said evenly.
“I’ve worked with military nanosystems,” said Hansen. “And I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” Hand loosened slightly and leaned forward to gesture at the holodisplay. “This is new. What you’re looking at here is a null configuration. The nanobes have no specific programming to follow.”
“So what are they doing?” asked Ameli Vongsavath.
Hand looked surprised. “Nothing. They are doing nothing, Mistress Vongsavath. Exactly that. They feed off the radiation from the blast, they reproduce at a modest rate and they. Exist. Those are the only designed parameters.”
“Sounds harmless,” said Cruickshank dubiously.
I saw Sutjiadi and Hansen exchange glances.
“Harmless, certainly, as things stand now.” Hand hit a stud on his chair’s board and the frozen image vanished. “Captain, I think it’s best if we wrap this up for now. Would I be right in assuming the sensors we have strung should warn us of any unforeseen developments ahead of time?”
Sutjiadi frowned.
“Anything that moves will show up,” he agreed. “But—”
“Excellent. Then we should all get back to work.”
A murmur ran round the briefing circle. Someone snorted. Sutjiadi snapped icily for quiet. Hand stood up and pushed through the flap to his quarters. Ole Hansen jerked his chin after the executive, and a ripple of supportive muttering broke out. Sutjiadi reprised his shut-the-fuck-up frost, and started handing out tasks.
I waited it out. The members of the Dangrek team drifted out in ones and twos, the last of them ushered out by Sutjiadi. Tanya Wardani hovered briefly at the door to the bubblefab on her way out, looking in my direction, but Schneider said something in her ear and the two of them followed the general flow. Sutjiadi gave me a hard stare when he saw I was staying, but he walked away. I gave it another couple of minutes, then got up and went to the flap of Hand’s quarters. I touched the chime and walked in.
Hand was stretched out on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling. He barely looked in my direction.
“What do you want, Kovacs?”
I snapped out a chair and sat in it. “Well, less tinsel than you’re currently deploying would be a start.”
“I don’t believe I’ve told any lies to anyone recently. And I try to keep track.”
“You haven’t told much truth either. Not to the grunts anyway, and with spec ops, I think that’s a mistake. They aren’t stupid.”
“No, they aren’t stupid.” He said it with the detachment of a botanist labelling specimens. “But they’re paid, and that’s as good or better.”
I examined the side of my hand. “I’ve been paid too, but that won’t stop me ripping your throat out if I find you’re trying to tinsel me.”
Silence. If the threat bothered him, it didn’t show.
“So,” I said at last, “you going to tell me what’s going on with the nanotech?”
“Nothing is going on. What I told Mistress Vongsavath was accurate. The nanobes are in a null configuration because they are doing precisely nothing.”
“Come on, Hand. If they’re doing nothing, then what are you so bent out of shape about?”
He stared at the ceiling of the bubblefab for a while. He seemed fascinated by the dull grey lining of the bubblefab’s ceiling. I was on the point of getting up and hauling him bodily off the bed, but something in the Envoy condi
tioning held me in place. Hand was working through something.
“Do you know,” he murmured, “the great thing about wars like this?”
“Keeps the population from thinking too hard?”
A faint smile flitted across his face.
“The potential for innovation,” he said.
The assertion seemed to give him sudden energy. He swung his feet off the bed and sat up, elbows on knees, hands clasped. His eyes bored into mine.
“What do you think of the Protectorate, Kovacs?”
“You’re joking, right?”
He shook his head. “No games. No entrapment. What’s the Protectorate to you?”
“The skeletal grip of a corpse’s hand round eggs trying to hatch?”
“Very lyrical, but I didn’t ask you what Quell called it. I asked what you think.”
I shrugged. “I think she was right.”
Hand nodded.
“Yes,” he said simply. “She was right. The human race has straddled the stars. We’ve plumbed the insides of a dimension we have no senses to perceive in order to do it. We’ve built societies on worlds so far apart that the fastest ships we have would take half a millennium to get from one side of our sphere of influence to the other. And you know how we did all that?”
“I think I’ve heard this speech.”
“The corporations did it. Not governments. Not politicians. Not this fucking joke Protectorate we pay lip service to. Corporate planning gave us the vision, corporate investment paid for it, and corporate employees built it.”
“Let’s hear it for the corporations.” I patted my palms together, half a dozen dry strokes.
Hand ignored it. “And when we were done, what happened? The UN came and they muzzled us. They stripped us of the powers they’d awarded us for the diaspora. They levied their taxes again, they rewrote their protocols. They castrated us.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Hand.”
“You’re not funny, Kovacs. Do you have any idea what technological advances we might have made by now if that muzzle hadn’t gone back on. Do you know how fast we were during the diaspora?”
“I’ve read about it.”
“In spaceflight, in cryogenics, in bioscience, in machine intelligence.” He ticked them off on bent-back fingers. “A century of advances in less than a decade. A global tetrameth rush for the entire scientific community. And it all stopped with the Protectorate protocols. We’d have fucking faster-than-light spaceflight by now if they hadn’t stopped us. Guaranteed.”
“Easy to say now. I think you’re omitting a few inconvenient historical details, but that’s not really the point. You’re trying to tell me the Protectorate has unwritten the protocols for you, just so you can get this little war won at speed?”
“In essence, yes.” His hands made shaping motions in the space between his knees. “It’s not official, of course. No more than all those Protectorate dreadnoughts that aren’t officially anywhere near Sanction IV. But unofficially, every member of the Cartel has a mandate to push war-related product development to the hilt, and then further.”
“And that’s what’s squirming around out there? Pushed-to-the-hilt nanoware?”
Hand compressed his lips. “SUS-L. Smart Ultra Short-Lived nanobe systems.”
“Sounds promising. So what does it do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh for f—”
“No.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know. None of us do. It’s a new front. They’re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems.”
“The OPERN System? That’s just so fucking cute. And it’s a weapon?”
“Of course it is.”
“So how does it work?”
“Kovacs, you don’t listen.” There was a dreary kind of enthusiasm building in his voice now. “It’s an evolving system. Smart evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way—imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we’re only just starting to map what it can do. They’ve modelled it in high-speed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like grasshoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact.”
“Oh. Good.”
“It shouldn’t take that turn out here—there’s not the density of military personnel for it to be an evolutionarily selective trait.”
“But it could do pretty much anything else.”
“Yes.” The Mandrake exec looked at his hands. “I would imagine so. Once it goes active.”
“And how long have we got before that happens?”
Hand shrugged. “Until it disturbs Sutjiadi’s sentry systems. As soon as they fire on it, it starts evolving to cope.”
“And if we go blast it now? Because I know that’s going to be Sutjiadi’s vote.”
“With what? If we use the UV in the Nagini, it’ll just be ready for the sentry systems that much faster. If we use something else, it’ll evolve around that and probably go up against the sentries that much tougher and smarter. It’s nanoware. You can’t kill nanobes individually. And some always survive. Fuck, Kovacs, eighty per cent kill rate is what our labs work off as an evolutionary ideal. It’s the principle of the thing. Some survive, the toughest motherfuckers, and those are the ones that work out how to beat you next time around. Anything, anything at all you do to kick it out of the null configuration just makes things worse.”
“There must be some way to shut it down.”
“Yes, there is. All you need are the project termination codes. Which I don’t have.”
The radiation or the drugs, whatever it was, I felt suddenly tired. I stared at Hand through gritted up eyes. Nothing to say that wouldn’t be a rant along the lines of Tanya Wardani’s tirade against Sutjiadi the night before. Waste of warm air. You can’t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.
Hand cleared his throat. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here before it gets very far advanced.”
“If Ghede is on our side, don’t you mean?”
He smiled. “If you like.”
“You don’t believe a word of that shit, Hand.”
The smile wiped away. “How would you know what I believe?”
“OPERNS. SUS-L. You know the acronyms. You know the construct-run results. You know this fucking programme hardware and soft. Carrera warned us about nanotech deployment, you didn’t blink. And now suddenly you’re pissed-off and scared. Something doesn’t fit.”
“That’s unfortunate.” He started to get up. “I’ve told you as much as I’m going to, Kovacs.”
I beat him to his feet and drew one of the interface guns, right-handed. It clung to my palm like something feeding.
“Sit down.”
He looked at the levelled gun—
“Don’t be ridiculou—”
—then at my face, and his voice dried up.
“Sit. Down.”
He lowered himself carefully back to the bed. “If you harm me, Kovacs, you’ve lost everything. Your money on Latimer, your passage offworld—”
“From the sound of it, I don’t look much like collecting at the moment anyway.”
“I’m backed up, Kovacs. Even if you kill me, it’s a wasted bullet. They’ll re-sleeve me in Landfall and—”
“Have you ever been shot in the stomach?”
His eyes snapped to mine. He shut up.
“These are high
-impact fragmentation slugs. Close-quarters antipersonnel load. I imagine you saw what they did to Deng’s crew. They go in whole and they come out like monomol shards. I shoot you in the gut and it’ll take you the best part of a day to die. Whatever they do with your stored self, you’ll go through that here and now. I died that way once, and I’m telling you, it’s something you want to avoid.”
“I think Captain Sutjiadi might have something to say about that.”
“Sutjiadi will do what I tell him, and so will the others. You didn’t make any friends in that meeting, and they don’t want to die at the hands of your evolving nanobes any more than I do. Now suppose we finish this conversation in a civilised fashion.”
I watched him measure the will in my eyes, in my gathered stance. He’d have some diplomatic psychosense conditioning, some learned skill at gauging these things, but Envoy training has a built-in capacity to deceive that leaves most corporate bioware standing. Envoys project pure from a base of synthetic belief. At that moment, I didn’t even know myself whether I was going to shoot him or not.
He read real intent. Or something else cracked. I saw the moment cross his face. I put up the smart gun. I didn’t know which way it would have gone. You very often don’t. Being an Envoy is like that.
“This doesn’t go outside the room,” he said. “I’ll tell the others about SUS-L, but the rest we keep at this level. Anything else will be counterproductive.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”
“It would appear,” he spoke slowly, as if the words tasted bad. “That I have overextended myself. We’ve been set up.”
“By?”
“You wouldn’t know them. Competitors.”
I seated myself again. “Another corporation?”
He shook his head. “OPERNS is a Mandrake package. We bought in the SUS-L specialists freelance, but the project is Mandrake’s. Sealed up tight. These are execs inside Mandrake, jockeying for position. Colleagues.”
The last word came out like spit.
“You got a lot of colleagues like that?”
That raised a grimace. “You don’t make friends in Mandrake, Kovacs. Associates will back you as far as it pays them to. Beyond that, you’re dead in the water if you trust anyone. Comes with the territory. I’m afraid I have miscalculated.”
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