“So they deploy the OPERN systems in the hope you won’t come back from Dangrek. Isn’t that kind of short-sighted? In view of why we’re here, I mean?”
The Mandrake exec spread his hands. “They don’t know why we’re here. The data’s sealed in the Mandrake stack, my access only. It will have cost them every favour they own just to find out I’m down here in the first place.”
“If they’re looking to take you down here…”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
I saw new reasons why he wouldn’t want to take a bullet out here. I revised my estimate of the face-down. Hand hadn’t cracked, he’d calculated.
“So how safe is your remote storage?”
“From outside Mandrake? Pretty much impregnable. From inside?” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know. We left in a hurry. The security codes are relatively old. Given time.”
He shrugged.
“Always about time, huh?”
“We could always pull back,” I offered. “Use Carrera’s incoming code to withdraw.”
Hand smiled tightly.
“Why do you think Carrera gave us that code? Experimental nanotech is locked up under Cartel protocols. In order to deploy it, my enemies would have to have influence at War Council level. That means access to the authorisation codes for the Wedge and anyone else fighting on the Cartel side. Forget Carrera. Carrera’s in their pocket. Even if it wasn’t at the time Carrera gave it out, the incoming code is just a missile tag waiting to go operative now.” The tight smile again. “And I understand the Wedge generally hit what they’re shooting at.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Generally, they do.”
“So.” Hand got up and walked to the window flap opposite his bed. “Now you know it all. Satisfied?”
I thought it through.
“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is…”
“That’s right.” He didn’t look away from the window. “A transmission detailing what we’ve found and the serial number of the claim buoy deployed to mark it as Mandrake property. Those are the only things that’ll put me back into the game at a level high enough to trump these infidels.”
I sat there for a while longer, but he seemed to have finished, so I got up to leave. He still didn’t look at me. Watching his face, I felt an unlooked-for twinge of sympathy for him. I knew what miscalculation felt like. At the exit flap, I paused.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Maybe you’d better say some prayers,” I told him. “Might make you feel better.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Wardani worked herself grey.
She attacked the gate’s impassive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the assembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the scraps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.
When she was there, I stayed out of the way and watched her hunched figure through the ‘fab flap from a vantage point on the loading hatch of the Nagini. Close-focus neurachem reeled in the image and gave me her face intent over the sketchboard or the chiploader deck. When she went to the cave, I stood amidst the chaos of discarded technoglyph sketching on the floor of the bubblefab and watched her on the wall of monitors.
She wore her hair pulled severely back, but strands got out and rioted on her forehead. One usually made it down the side of her face, and left me with a feeling I couldn’t put in place.
I watched the work, and what it did to her.
Sun and Hansen watched their remote-sentry board, in shifts.
Sutjiadi watched the mouth of the cave, whether Wardani was working there or not.
The rest of the crew watched half-scrambled satellite broadcasts. Kempist propaganda channels when they could get them, for the laughs, government programming when they couldn’t. Kemp’s personal appearances drew jeers and mock shootings of the screen, Lapinee recruitment numbers drew applause and chant-alongs. Somewhere along the line, the spectrum of response got blurred into a general irony and Kemp and Lapinee started getting each other’s fanmail. Deprez and Cruickshank drew beads on Lapinee whenever she cropped up, and the whole crew had Kemp’s ideological speeches down, chanting along with full body language and demagogue gestures. Mostly, whatever was on kick-fired much-needed laughter. Even Jiang joined in with the pale flicker of a smile now and then.
Hand watched the ocean, angled south and east.
Occasionally, I tipped my head back to the splatter of starfire across the night sky, and wondered who was watching us.
Two days in, the remotes drew first blood on a nanobe colony.
I was vomiting up my breakfast when the ultravibe battery cut loose. You could feel the thrum in your bones and the pit of your stomach, which didn’t help much.
Three separate pulses. Then nothing.
I wiped my mouth clean, hit the bathroom niche’s disposal stud and went out onto the beach. The sky was nailed down grey to the horizon, only the persistent smouldering of Sauberville to mar it. No other smoke, no rinsed-out splash of fireglow to signify machine damage.
Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.
“You feel that?”
“Yeah.” I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. “Looks like we’ve engaged.”
She glanced sideways at me. “You OK?”
“Threw up. Don’t look so smug. Couple of days, you’ll be at it yourself.”
“Thanks.”
The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.
“That’s the bead,” said Cruickshank. “The first three were tracking shots. Now it’s locked on.”
“Good.”
The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal passages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.
“Do you mind?”
“Oh. Sorry.” She looked away.
I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.
Fuck.
“Where’s Sutjiadi?”
She pointed towards the Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the assault ship’s nose and Sutjiadi stood on it with Ole Hansen, apparently discussing some aspect of the vessel’s forward battery. A short distance up the beach, Ameli Vongsavath sat on a low dune and watched. Deprez, Sun and Jiang were either still at breakfast in the ship’s galley, or off doing something to kill the waiting.
Cruickshank shaded her eyes and looked at the two men on the ramp.
“I think our captain’s been looking forward to this,” she said reflectively. “He’s been rubbing up against that big bunch of guns every day since we got here. Look, he’s smiling.”
I trudged across to the ramp, riding out slow waves of nausea. Sutjiadi saw me coming and crouched down on the edge. No trace of the alleged smile.
“It seems our time has run out.”
“Not yet. Hand said it’ll take the nanobes a few days to evolve suitable responses to the ultravibe. I’d say we’re about halfway.”
/>
“Then let’s hope your archaeologue friend is similarly advanced. Have you talked to her recently?”
“Has anybody?”
He grimaced. Wardani hadn’t been very communicative since the news about the OPERN system broke. At mealtimes, she ate for fuel and left. She shot down attempts at conversation with monosyllable fire.
“I’d appreciate a status report,” said Sutjiadi.
“On it.”
I went up the beach via Cruickshank, trading a Limon handshake she’d shown me as I passed. It was applied reflex, but it gusted a little smile across my face and the sickness in my guts receded a fraction. Something the Envoys taught me. Reflex can touch some odd, deep places.
“Talk to you?” asked Ameli Vongsavath when I reached her vantage point.
“Yeah, I’ll be back down here in a moment. Just want to check on our resident driven woman.”
It didn’t get much of a smile.
I found Wardani slumped in a lounger at one side of the cave, glowering at the gate. Playback sequences flickered on the filigree screens stretch-deployed over her head. The datacoil weaving at her side was cleared, motes of data circling forlornly at the top left corner where she had left them minimised. It was an unusual configuration—most people crush the display motes flat to the projection surface when they’re done—but either way it was the electronic equivalent of sweeping an arm across your desk and dumping the contents all over the floor. On the monitors, I’d watched her do it time and again, the exasperated gesture made somehow elegant by the reversed, upward sweep. It was something I liked watching.
“I’d rather you didn’t ask the obvious question,” she said.
“The nanobes have engaged.”
She nodded. “Yeah, felt it. What’s that give us, about three or four days?”
“Hand said four at the outside. So don’t feel like you’re under any kind of pressure here.”
That got a wan smile. Evidently I was warming up.
“Getting anywhere?”
“That’s the obvious question, Kovacs.”
“Sorry.” I found a packing case and perched on it. “Sutjiadi’s getting twitchy though. He’s looking for parameters.”
“I guess I’d better stop pissing about and just open this thing, then.”
I mustered a smile of my own. “That’d be good, yeah.”
Quiet. The gate sucked my attention.
“It’s there,” she muttered. “The wavelengths are right, the sound and vision glyphs check out. The maths works, that is, as far as I understand the maths, it works. I’ve backed up from what I know should happen, extrapolated, this is what we did last time, near as I can remember. It should fucking work. I’m missing something. Something I’ve forgotten. Maybe something I had.” Her face twitched. “Battered out of me.”
There was a hysterical snap in her voice as she shut up, an edge cutting back along the line of memories she couldn’t afford. I scrambled after it.
“If someone’s been here before us, could they have changed the settings in some way?”
She was silent for a while. I waited it out. Finally, she looked up.
“Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “Uh. For the vote of confidence. But you know, it’s kind of unlikely. Millions to one unlikely. No, I’m pretty sure I’ve just missed something.”
“But it is possible?”
“It’s possible, Kovacs. Anything’s possible. But realistically, no. No one human could have done that.”
“Humans opened it,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. Kovacs, a dog can open a door if it stands tall enough on its hind legs. But when was the last time you saw a dog take the hinges off a door and rehang it?”
“Alright.”
“There’s an order of competence here. Everything we’ve learnt to do with Martian technology—reading the astrogation charts, activating the storm shelters, riding that metro system they found on Nkrumah’s Land—these are all things any ordinary adult Martians could do in their sleep. Basic tech. Like driving a car or living in a house. This.” She gestured at the hunched spire on the other side of her battery of instruments. “This is the pinnacle of their technology. The only one we’ve found in five hundred years of scratching around on more than thirty worlds.”
“Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong places. Pawing shiny plastic packing while we tread underfoot the delicate circuitry it once protected.”
She shot me a hard look. “What are you, a Wycinski convert?”
“I did some reading in Landfall. Not easy finding copies of his later stuff, but Mandrake has a pretty eclectic set of datastacks. According to what I saw, he was pretty convinced the whole Guild search protocol is fucked.”
“He was bitter by the time he wrote that. It isn’t easy to be a certified visionary one day and a purged dissident the next.”
“He predicted the gates, didn’t he?”
“Pretty much. There were hints in some of the archive material his teams recovered at Bradbury. A couple of references to something called the Step Beyond. The Guild chose to interpret that as a lyrical poet’s take on hypercast technology. Back then we couldn’t tell what we were reading. Epic poetry or weather reports, it all looked the same and the Guild were just happy if we could squeeze some raw meaning out. The Step Beyond as a translation of hypercaster was meaning snatched from the jaws of ignorance. If it referred to some piece of technology no one had ever seen, that was no use to anybody.”
A swelling vibration spanned the cave. Dust filtered down from around the makeshift bracing. Wardani tipped a glance upward.
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, better keep an eye on that. Hansen and Sun both reckon it’ll stand reverberations a lot closer than the sentries on the inner ring, but then.” I shrugged. “Both of them have made at least one fatal mistake in the past. I’ll get a ramp in here and check the roof isn’t going to fall on you in your moment of triumph.”
“Thanks.”
I shrugged again. “In everyone’s interests, really.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh.” I gestured, suddenly feeling clumsy. “Look, you opened this thing before. You can do it again. Just a matter of time.”
“Which we don’t have.”
“Tell me,” I looked, Envoy-rapid, for some way to disrupt the spiralling gloom in her voice. “If this really is the pinnacle of Martian technology, how come your team were able to crack it in the first place? I mean…?”
I lifted my hands in appeal.
She cracked another weary smile, and I wondered suddenly how hard the radiation poisoning and the chemical counterbalance were hitting her.
“You still don’t get it, do you Kovacs? These aren’t humans we’re talking about. They didn’t think the way we do. Wycinski called it peeled-back democratic technoaccess. It’s like the storm shelters. Anyone could access them—any Martian, that is—because, well, what’s the point of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?”
“You’re right. That isn’t human.”
“It’s one of the reasons Wycinski got into trouble with the Guild in the first place. He wrote a paper on the storm shelters. The science behind the shelters is actually quite complicated, but they’d been built in such a way that it didn’t matter. The control systems were rendered back to a simplicity even we could operate. He called it a clear indication of species-wide unity, and he said it demonstrated that the concept of a Martian imperium tearing itself apart in a colonial war was just so much bullshit.”
“Just didn’t know when to shut up, huh?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“So what was he arguing? A war against another race? Somebody we haven’t run up against yet?”
Wardani shrugged. “That, or they just pulled out of this region of the galaxy and went somewhere else. He never really went far down either line of reasoning. Wycinski was an iconoclast. He was more concerned with tearing down t
he idiocies the Guild had already perpetrated than with constructing his own theories.”
“That’s a surprisingly stupid way to behave for someone so bright.”
“Or surprisingly brave.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Wardani shook her head. “Whatever. The point is, all the technology we’ve discovered that we understand, we can work.” She gestured at the banks of equipment ranged around the gate. “We have to synthesise the light from a Martian throat gland, and the sonics we think they produced, but if we understand it, we can make it work. You asked how come we were able to crack it last time. It was designed that way. Any Martian needing to get through this gate could open it. And that means, given this equipment and enough time, we can too.”
The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.
“You going?”
“I’ve got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?”
She looked at me strangely. “Nothing else, thanks.” She straightened up a little in the lounger. “I’ve got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I’ll be down to eat.”
“Good. See you then. Oh,” I paused on my way out. “What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something.”
“Tell him I’ll have this gate open inside two days.”
“Really?”
She smiled. “No, probably not. But tell him anyway.”
Hand was busy.
The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the centre of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.
“What the fuck are you doing, Hand?”
He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.
“I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me.”
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