“Reasons do not make you right, Lieutenant Kovacs.” There was a sudden softness in Carrera’s tone that said I’d overstepped the line. “Every graft-wrapped pimp on Plaza de los Caidos has a reason for every whore’s face they carve up, but that doesn’t make it right. Joshua Kemp has reasons for what he does and from his point of view they might even be good ones. That doesn’t make him right.”
“You want to watch what you’re saying, Isaac. That sort of relativism could get you arrested.”
“I doubt it. You’ve seen Lamont.”
“Yeah.”
Silence ebbed and flowed around us.
“So,” I said finally. “You’re going to put Sutjiadi under the anatomiser.”
“Do I have a choice?”
I just looked at him.
“We are the Wedge, lieutenant. You know what that means.” There was the slightest tug of urgency in his tone now. I don’t know who he was trying to convince. “You were sworn in, just like everyone else. You know the codes. We stand for unity in the face of chaos, and everyone has to know that. Those we deal with have to know that we are not to be fucked with. We need that fear, if we’re going to operate effectively. And my soldiers have to know that that fear is an absolute. That it will be enforced. Without that, we fall apart.”
I closed my eyes. “Whatever.”
“I’m not requiring you to watch it.”
“I doubt there’ll be enough seats.”
Behind my closed eyelids, I heard him move. When I looked, he was leaning over me, hands braced on the edges of the projector table, face harsh with anger.
“You’re going to shut up now, Kovacs. You’re going to stand down that attitude.” If he was looking for resistance, he couldn’t have seen any in my face. He backed off a half metre, straightened up. “I won’t let you piss away your commission like this. You’re a capable officer, lieutenant. You inspire loyalty in the men you lead, and you understand combat.”
“Thanks.”
“You can laugh, but I know you. It’s a fact.”
“It’s the biotech, Isaac. Wolf gene pack dynamics, serotonin shutout and Envoy psychosis to pilot the whole fucking shambles. A dog could do what I’ve done for the Wedge. Dog fucking Veutin, for example.”
“Yes.” A shrug as he settled himself on the edge of the desk again. “You and Veutin are, were, very similar in profile. I have the psychosurgeon assessments on file here, if you don’t believe me. Same Kemmerich gradient, same IQ, same lack of generalisable empathy range. To the untutored eye, you could be the same man.”
“Yeah, except he’s dead. Even to the untutored eye, that’s got to stand out.”
“Well, maybe not quite the same lack of empathy, then. The Envoys gave you enough diplomatic training not to underestimate men like Sutjiadi. You would have handled him better.”
“So Sutjiadi’s crime was he got underestimated? Seems as good a reason as any to torture a man to death, I suppose.”
He stopped and stared at me. “Lieutenant Kovacs, I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Sutjiadi’s execution is not under discussion here. He murdered my soldiers, and at dawn tomorrow I will exact the penalty for that crime. I may not like it—”
“How gratifyingly humane of you.”
He ignored me. “—but it needs to be done, and I will do it. And you, if you know what’s good for you, will ratify it.”
“Or else?” It wasn’t as defiant as I’d have liked, and I spoilt it at the end with a coughing fit that racked me over in the narrow chair and brought up blood-streaked phlegm. Carrera handed me a wipe.
“You were saying?”
“I said, if I won’t ratify the ghoul show, what happens to me?”
“Then I’ll inform the men that you knowingly attempted to protect Sutjiadi from Wedge justice.”
I looked around for somewhere to toss the soiled wipe. “Is that an accusation?”
“Under the table. No, there. Next to your leg. Kovacs, it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. I think you probably did, but I don’t really care one way or the other. I have to have order, and justice must be seen to be done. Fit in with that, and you can have your rank back, plus a new command. If you step out of line, you’ll be next on the slab.”
“Loemanako and Kwok won’t like that.”
“No, they won’t. But they are Wedge soldiers, and they will do as they are told for the good of the Wedge.”
“So much for inspiring loyalty.”
“Loyalty is a currency like any other. What you have earned, you can spend. And shielding a known murderer of Wedge personnel is more than you can afford. More than any of us can afford.” He leaned off the desk edge. Beneath the coveralls, Envoy scan read his stance at endgame. It was the way he always stood in the final round of sparring sessions that had gone down to the wire. The way I’d seen him stand when the government troops broke around us at Shalai Gap and Kemp’s airborne infantry swept down out of the storm-front sky like hail. There was no fallback from here. “I do not want to lose you, Kovacs, and I do not want to distress the soldiers who have followed you. But in the end, the Wedge is more than any one man within it. We cannot afford internal dissent.”
Outnumbered and outgunned and left for dead at Shalai, Carrera held position in the bombed-out streets and buildings for two hours, until the storm swept in and covered everything. Then he led a stalk-and-slaughter counteroffensive through the howling wind and street-level shreds of cloud until the airwaves crackled stiff with panicked airborne commanders ordering withdrawal. When the storm lifted, Shalai Gap was littered with the Kempist dead and the Wedge had taken less than two dozen casualties.
He leaned close again, no longer angry. His eyes searched my face.
“Am I—finally—making myself clear, lieutenant? A sacrifice is required. We may not like it, you and I, but that is the price of Wedge membership.”
I nodded.
“Then you are ready to move past this?”
“I’m dying, Isaac. About all I’m ready for right now is some sleep.”
“I understand. I won’t keep you much longer. Now.” He gestured through the datacoil and it awoke in swirls. I sighed and groped after fresh focus. “The penetration squad took an extrapolated line back from the Nagini’s angle of re-entry and fetched up pretty damn close to the same docking bay you breached. Loemanako says there were no apparent shut-out controls. So how did you get in?”
“Was already open.” I couldn’t be bothered to construct lies, guessed in any case that he’d interrogate the others soon enough. “For all we know, there are no shut-out controls.”
“On a warship?” His eyes narrowed. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Isaac, the whole ship mounts a spatial shield that stands at least two kilometres out from the hull. What the fuck would they need with individual docking station shut out?”
“You saw that?”
“Yeah. Very much in action.”
“Hmm.” He made a couple of minor adjustments in the coil. “The sniffer units found human traces a good three or four kilometres into the interior. But they found you in an observation bubble not much more than a kilometre and a half from your entry point.”
“Well, that couldn’t have been hard. We painted the way with big fucking illuminum arrows.”
He gave me a hard look. “Did you go walkabout in there?”
“Not me, no.” I shook my head, then regretted it as the little cabin pulsed unpleasantly in and out of focus around me. I waited it out. “Some of them did. I never found out how far they went.”
“Doesn’t sound very organised.”
“It wasn’t,” I said irritably. “I don’t know, Isaac. Try and incubate a sense of wonder, huh? Might help when you get over there.”
“So it, ah, appears.” He hesitated, and it took me a moment to realise he was embarrassed. “You, ah, you saw. Ghosts. Over there?”
I shrugged, suppressing an urge to cackle uncontrollably. “We saw someth
ing. I’m still not sure what it was. Been listening in to your guests, Isaac?”
He smiled and made an apologetic gesture. “Lamont’s habits, rubbing off on me. And since he’s lost the taste for snooping, seems a shame to let the equipment go to waste.” He prodded again at the datacoil. “The medical report says you all showed symptoms of a heavy stunblast, except you and Sun, obviously.”
“Yeah, Sun shot herself. We…” Abruptly, it seemed impossible to explain. Like trying to shoulder a massive weight unaided. The last moments in the Martian starship, wrapped in the brilliant pain and radiance of whatever her crew had left behind them. The certainty that this alien grief was going to crack us open. How did you convey that to the man who had led you behind raging gunfire to victory at Shalai Gap and a dozen other engagements? How did you get across the ice-aching diamond-bright reality of those moments?
Reality? The doubt jolted rudely.
Was it? Come to that, come to the gun barrel-and-grime reality that Isaac Carrera lived, was it real any more? Had it ever been? How much of what I remembered was hard fact?
No, look. I’ve got Envoy recall—
But had it been that bad? I looked into the datacoil, trying wearily to muster rational thought. Hand had called it, and I bought in with something not much short of panic. Hand, the hougan. Hand, the religious maniac. When else had I ever trusted him as far as I could throw him?
Why had I trusted him then?
Sun. I grabbed at the fact. Sun knew. She saw it coming and she blew her own brains out rather than face it.
Carrera was looking at me strangely.
“Yes?”
You and Sun…
“Wait a minute.” It dawned on me. “You said except Sun and me?”
“Yes. The others all show the standard electroneural trauma. Heavy blast, as I said.”
“But not me.”
“Well, no.” He looked puzzled. “You weren’t touched. Why, do you remember someone shooting you?”
When we were done, he flattened the datacoil display with one callused hand and walked me back through the empty corridors of the battlewagon and then across the night-time murmur of the camp. We didn’t talk much. He’d backed up in the face of my confusion, and let the debriefing slide. Probably he couldn’t believe he was seeing one of his pet Envoys in this state.
I was having a hard time believing it myself.
She shot you. You dropped the stunner and she shot you, then herself. She must have.
Otherwise…
I shivered.
On a clear patch of sand to the rear of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, they were erecting the scaffold for Sutjiadi’s execution. The primary support struts were already in place, sunk deep into the sand and poised to receive the tilted, runnelled butcher’s platform. Under the illumination from three Angier lamps and the environ floods from the battlewagon’s rear drop hatch, the structure was a claw of bleached bone rising from the beach. The disassembled segments of the anatomiser lay close by, like sections of a wasp someone had chopped to death.
“The war’s shifting,” said Carrera conversationally. “Kemp’s a spent force on this continent. We haven’t had an air strike in weeks. He’s using the iceberg fleet to evacuate his forces across the Wacharin straits.”
“Can’t he hold the coast there?” I asked the question on automatic, the ghost of attention from a hundred deployment briefings past.
Carrera shook his head. “Not a chance. That’s a flood plain a hundred klicks back south and east. Nowhere to dig in, and he doesn’t have the hardware to build wet bunkers. That means no long-term jamming, no net-supported weapon systems. Give me six more months and I’ll have amphibious armour harrying him off the whole coastal strip. Another year and we’ll be parking the ‘Chandra over Indigo City.”
“And then what?”
“Sorry?”
“And then what? When you’ve taken Indigo City, when Kemp’s bombed and mined and particle-blasted every worthwhile asset there is and escaped into the mountains with the real diehards, then what?”
“Well.” Carrera puffed out his cheeks. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “The usual. Holding strategy across both continents, limited police actions and scapegoating until everyone calms down. But by that time…”
“By that time we’ll be gone, right?” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Off this fucking mudball and somewhere where they know a losing game when they see one. Give me that much good news at least.”
He looked across at me and winked. “Hun Home’s looking good. Internal power struggle, lots of palace intrigue. Just your speed.”
“Thanks.”
At the bubblefab flap, low voices filtered out into the night air. Carrera cocked his head and listened.
“Come in and join the party,” I said morosely, pushing through ahead of him. “Save you going back to Lamont’s toys.”
The three remaining members of the Mandrake expedition were gathered in seats around a low table at the end of the ward. Carrera’s security had broomed off the bulk of the inhib units and left each prisoner at detention-standard, a single inhibitor squatting like a tumour at the nape of the neck. It made everyone look peculiarly hunched, as if caught in mid-conspiracy.
They looked round as we entered the ward, reacting across a spectrum. Deprez was the least expressive; barely a muscle moved in his face. Vongsavath caught my eye and raised her brows. Wardani looked past me to where Carrera stood and spat on the quick-wipe floor.
“That’s for me, I assume,” said the Wedge commander easily.
“Share it,” suggested the archaeologue. “You seem close enough.”
Carrera smiled. “I’d advise against cranking up your hate too far, Mistress Wardani. Your little friend back there is apt to bite.”
She shook her head, wordless. One hand rose in reflex, halfway to the inhib unit, then dropped away. Maybe she’d already tried removing it. It’s not a mistake you make twice.
Carrera walked to the splatter of saliva, bent and scooped it up with one finger. He examined it closely, brought it to his nose and grimaced.
“You don’t have long, Mistress Wardani. In your place I think I’d be a little more civil to the person who’s going to advise on whether you’re re-sleeved or not.”
“I doubt that’ll be your decision.”
“Well.” The Wedge commander wiped his finger on the nearest bedsheet, “I did say ‘advise’. But then, this presupposes that you make it back to Landfall in some re-sleevable capacity. Which you might not.”
Wardani turned to me, blocking Carrera off in the process. A subtle snub that made the diplomatic strand in my conditioning want to applaud.
“Is your catamite here threatening me?”
I shook my head. “Making a point, I think.”
“Too subtle for me.” She cast a disdainful glance back at the Wedge commander. “Perhaps you’d better just shoot me in the stomach. That seems to work well. Your preferred method of civilian pacification, presumably.”
“Ah, yes. Hand.” Carrera hooked a chair from the collection around the table. He turned it back forward and straddled it. “Was he a friend of yours?”
Wardani looked at him.
“I didn’t think so. Not your sort at all.”
“That has nothing to—”
“Did you know he was responsible for the bombing of Sauberville?”
Another wordless pause. This time the archaeologue’s face sagged with shock, and suddenly I saw how very far the radiation had eaten into her.
Carrera saw it too.
“Yes, Mistress Wardani. Someone had to clear a path for your little quest, and Matthias Hand arranged for it to be our mutual friend Joshua Kemp. Oh, nothing direct of course. Military misinformation, carefully modelled and then equally carefully leaked along the right data channels. But enough to convince our resident revolutionary hero in Indigo City that Sauberville would look better as a grease stain. And that thirty-seven of my men d
idn’t need their eyes any more.” He flipped a glance at me. “You must have guessed, right?”
I shrugged. “Seemed likely. A little too convenient otherwise.”
Wardani’s eyes snapped sideways to mine, disbelieving.
“You see, Mistress Wardani.” Carrera got up as if his whole body ached. “I’m sure you’d like to believe I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’m just a man doing a job. Men like Matthias Hand create the wars I make my living fighting. Keep that in mind next time you feel the need to insult me.”
The archaeologue said nothing, but I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face. Carrera turned to go, then stopped.
“Oh, and Mistress Wardani, one more thing. Catamite.” He looked at the floor, as if pondering the word. “I have what many would consider a rather limited range of sexual preferences, and anal penetration doesn’t feature among them. But I see from your camp records that the same cannot be said for you.”
She made a noise. Behind it, I almost heard the creak and shift of the recovery scaffolding Envoy artifice had built inside her. The sound of damage done. I found myself, inexplicably, on my feet.
“Isaac, you—”
“You?” He was grinning like a skull as he faced me. “You, you pup. Had better sit down.”
It was nearly a command, nearly froze me in my tracks. Envoy bile rose sneering and beat it aside.
“Kovacs—” Wardani’s voice, like a cable snapping.
I met Carrera halfway, one crooked hand rising for his throat, a muddled kick emerging from the rest of my sickness-tangled stance. The big Wedge body swayed in to meet me and he blocked both attacks with brutal ease. The kick slipped away left, taking me off balance and he locked out my striking arm at the elbow, then smashed it.
It made a crunching noise in the back of my head, an empty whisky tumbler crushed underfoot in some dimly lit bar. The agony swarmed my brain, wrenched out a single short scream and then subsided under neurachem pain management. Wedge combat custom—seemed the sleeve was still good for that much. Carrera had not released his hold, and I dangled from the grip he had on my forearm like a powered-down child’s doll. I flexed my undamaged arm experimentally, and he laughed. Then he twisted hard on the shattered elbow joint, so pain rose back up like a black cloud behind my eyes, and dropped me. A casual kick to the stomach left me foetal, and not interested in anything much above ankle height.
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