“I was going to the dighead,” she said. “That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—”
“Sure. I’ll walk with you.”
She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.
“Maybe I should get one of those.”
“Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.”
We plodded up the slope.
“You sure this is going to come off?” she asked.
“What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?”
“I think he’s a fucking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.”
“Tanya,” I said gently. “It wasn’t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji’s getting the deal of the millennium, and he knows it. He’s solid on this one, believe me.”
“Well. You’re the Envoy.”
The café was pretty much as I remembered it, a forlorn-looking herd of moulded chairs and tables gathered in the shade cast by the massive stanchions and struts of the dighead frame. A holomenu fluoresced weakly overhead, and a muted Lapinee playlist seeped into the air from speakers hung on the structure. Martian artefacts stood about the place in no particular pattern that I could discern. We were the only customers.
A terminally bored waiter sloped out of hiding somewhere and stood at our table, looking resentful. I glanced up at the menu then back at Wardani. She shook her head.
“Just water,” she said. “And cigarettes, if you’ve got them.”
“Site Sevens or Will to Victory?”
She grimaced. “Site Sevens.”
The waiter looked at me, obviously hoping I wasn’t going to spoil his day and order some food.
“Got coffee?”
He nodded.
“Bring me some. Black, with whisky in it.”
He trudged away. I raised an eyebrow at Wardani behind his back.
“Leave him alone. Can’t be much fun working here.”
“Could be worse. He could be a conscript. Besides,” I gestured around me at the artefacts. “Look at the décor. What more could you want?”
A wan smile.
“Takeshi.” She hunched forward over the table. “When you get the virtual gear installed. I, uh, I’m not going with you.”
I nodded. Been expecting this.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologising to me for?”
“You, uh. You’ve done a lot for me in the last couple of months. You got me out of the camp—”
“We pulled you out of the camp because we needed you. Remember.”
“I was angry when I said that. Not with you, but—”
“Yeah, with me. Me, Schneider, the whole fucking world in a uniform.” I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. And you were right. We got you out because we needed you. You don’t owe me anything.”
She studied her hands where they lay in her lap.
“You helped put me back together again, Takeshi. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but that Envoy recovery shit works. I’m getting better. Slowly, but it’s off that base.”
“That’s good.” I hesitated, then made myself say it. “Fact remains, I did it because I needed you. Part of the rescue package; there was no point in getting you out of the camp if we left half your soul behind.”
Her mouth twitched. “Soul?”
“Sorry, figure of speech. Too much time hanging around Hand. Look, I’ve got no problem with you bailing out. I’m kind of curious to know why, is all.”
The waiter toiled back into view at that point, and we quietened. He laid out the drinks and the cigarettes. Tanya Wardani slit the pack and offered me one across the table. I shook my head.
“I’m quitting. Those things’ll kill you.”
She laughed almost silently and fed herself one from the pack. Smoke curled up as she touched the ignition patch. The waiter left. I sipped at my whisky coffee and was pleasantly surprised. Wardani plumed smoke up into the dighead frame space.
“Why am I staying?”
“Why are you staying?”
She looked at the table top. “I can’t leave now, Takeshi. Sooner or later, what we found out there is going to get into the public domain. They’ll open the gate again. Or take an IP cruiser out there. Or both.”
“Yeah, sooner or later. But right now there’s a war in the way.”
“I can wait.”
“Why not wait on Latimer? It’s a lot safer there.”
“I can’t. You said yourself, transit time in the ‘Chandra has got to be eleven years, minimum. That’s full acceleration, without any course correction Ameli might have to do. Who knows what’s going to have happened back here in the next eleven years?”
“The war might have ended, for one thing.”
“The war might be over next year, Takeshi. Then Roespinoedji’s going to move on his investment, and when that happens, I want to be here.”
“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trust him any more than Hand. Now you want to work for him?”
“We, uh,” she looked at her hands again. “We talked about it this morning. He’s willing to hide me until things have calmed down. Get me a new sleeve.” She smiled a little sheepishly. “Guild Masters are thin on the ground since the war kicked in. I guess I’m part of his investment.”
“Guess so.” Even while the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t work out why I was trying so hard to talk her out of this. “You know that won’t help much if the Wedge come looking for you, don’t you?”
“Is that likely?”
“It could ha—” I sighed. “No, not really. Carrera’s probably backed up somewhere in a sneak station, but it’ll be a while before they realise that he’s dead. While longer before they sort the authorisation to sleeve the back-up copy. And even if he does get out to Dangrek, there’s nobody left to tell him what happened there.”
She shivered and looked away.
“It had to be done, Tanya. We had to cover our traces. You of all people should know that.”
“What?” Her eyes flicked back in my direction.
“I said. You of all people should know that.” I kept her gaze. “It’s what you did last time around. Isn’t it.”
She looked away again, convulsively. Smoke curled up off her cigarette and was snatched away by the breeze. I leaned into the silence between us.
“It doesn’t much matter now. You don’t have the skills to sink us between here and Latimer, and once we’re there you’ll never see me again. Would. Never have seen me again. And now you’re not coming with us. But like I said, I’m curious.”
She moved her arm as if it wasn’t connected to her, drew on the cigarette, exhaled mechanically. Her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.
“How long have you known?”
“Known?” I thought about it. “Honestly, I think I’ve known from the day we pulled you out of the camp. Nothing I could lock down, but I knew there was a problem. Someone tried to bust you out before we came. The camp commandant let that slip, in between fits of drooling.”
“Sounds unusually animated, for him.” She drew more smoke, hissed it out between her teeth.
“Yeah, well. Then of course there were your friends down on the rec deck at Mandrake. Now that one I really should have spotted on the launch pad. I mean, it’s only the oldest whore’s trick in the book. Lead the mark up a darkened alley by his dick, and hand him over to your pimp.”
She flinched. I forced a grin.
“Sorry. Figure of speech. I just feel kind of stupid. Tell me, was that gun-to-your-head stuff just tinsel, or were they serious?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “They were revolutionary guard cadres. Kemp’s hard men. They took out Deng when he came sniffing around after them. R
eally dead, stack torched and body sold off for spares. They told me that while we were waiting for you. Maybe to scare me, I don’t know. They probably would have shot me sooner than let me go again.”
“Yeah, they convinced the fuck out of me as well. But you still called them in, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said it to herself, as if discovering the truth for the first time. “I did.”
“Care to tell me why?”
She made a tiny motion, something that might have been her head shaking, or just a shiver.
“OK. Want to tell me how?”
She got herself back together, looked at me. “Coded signal. I set it up while you and Jan were out casing Mandrake. Told them to wait on my signal, then placed a call from my room in the tower when I was sure we were definitely going to Dangrek.” A smile crossed her face, but her voice could have been a machine’s. “I ordered underwear. From a catalogue. Locational code in the numbers. Basic stuff.”
I nodded. “Were you always a Kempist?”
She shifted impatiently. “I’m not from here, Kovacs. I don’t have any political, I don’t have any right to a political stance here.” She shot me an angry look. “But for Christ’s sake, Kovacs. It’s their fucking planet, isn’t it?”
“That sounds pretty much like a political stance to me.”
“Yeah, must be really nice not to have any beliefs.” She smoked some more, and I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. “I envy you your smug sanctimonious fucking detachment.”
“Well, it’s not hard to come by, Tanya.” I tried to curb the defensiveness in my voice. “Try working local military adviser to Joshua Kemp while Indigo City comes apart in civil riots around you. Remember those cuddly little inhib systems Carrera unloaded on us? First time I saw those in use on Sanction IV? Kemp’s guardsmen were using them on protesting artefact merchants in Indigo City, a year before the war kicked in. Maxed up, continuous discharge. No mercy for the exploitative classes. You get pretty detached after the first few street cleanups.”
“So you changed sides.” It was the same scorn I’d heard in her voice that night in the bar, the night she drove Schneider away.
“Well, not immediately. I thought about assassinating Kemp for a while, but it didn’t seem worth it. Some family member would have stepped in, some fucking cadre. And by then, the war was looking pretty meltable anyway. And like Quell says, these things need to run their hormonal course.”
“Is that how you survive it?” she whispered.
“Tanya. I have been trying to leave ever since.”
“I,” she shuddered. “I’ve watched you, Kovacs. I watched you in Landfall, in that firefight at the promoter’s offices, in the Mandrake Tower, the beach at Dangrek with your own men. I, I envied you what you have. How you live with yourself.”
I took brief refuge in my whisky coffee. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I can’t.” A helpless, fending gesture. “I can’t get them out of my head. Dhasanapongsakul, Aribowo, the rest of them. Most of them, I didn’t even see die, but they. Keep.” She swallowed hard. “How did you know?”
“You want to give me a cigarette now?”
She handed over the pack, wordlessly. I busied myself with lighting and inhaling, to no noticeable benefit. My system was so bombed on damage and Roespinoedji’s drugs, I would have been amazed if there had been. It was the thin comfort of habit, not much more.
“Envoy intuition doesn’t work like that,” I said slowly. “Like I said, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t want to take it on board. You uh, you make a good impression, Tanya Wardani. At some level, I didn’t want to believe it was you. Even when you sabotaged the hold—”
She started. “Vongsavath said—”
“Yeah, I know. She still thinks it was Schneider. I haven’t told her any different. I was pretty much convinced it was Schneider myself after he ran out on us. Like I said, I didn’t want to think it might be you. When the Schneider angle showed up, I went after it like a heatseeker. There was a moment in the docking bay when I worked him out. You know what I felt? I was relieved. I had my solution and I didn’t have to think about who else might be involved any more. So much for detachment, huh.”
She said nothing.
“But there were a whole stack of reasons why Schneider couldn’t be the whole story. And the Envoy conditioning just went on racking them up ‘til there was too much to ignore any more.”
“Such as?”
“Such as this.” I reached into a pocket and shook out a portable datastack. The membrane settled on the table and motes of light evolved in the projected datacoil. “Clean that space off for me.”
She looked at me curiously, then leaned forward and lobbed the display motes up to the top left-hand corner of the coil. The gesture echoed back in my head, the hours of watching her work in the screens of her own monitors. I nodded and smiled.
“Interesting habit. Most of us flatten down to the surface. More final, more satisfying I guess. But you’re different. You tidy upward.”
“Wycinski. It’s his.”
“That where you picked it up?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Probably.”
“You’re not Wycinski, are you?”
It startled a short laugh out of her. “No, I’m not. I worked with him at Bradbury, and on Nkrumah’s Land, but I’m half his age. Why would you think something like that?”
“Nothing. Just crossed my mind. You know, that cybersex virtuality. There was a lot of male tendency in what you did to yourself. Just wondered, you know. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a man?”
She smiled at me. “Wrong, Takeshi. Wrong way round. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a woman.”
For just a moment, something warm sparked between us, already fading as it came into being. Her smile washed away.
“So you were saying?”
I pointed at the datacoil. “That’s the pattern you leave after shutdown. That’s the pattern you left in the cabin datacoil on board the trawler. Presumably after you slammed the gate on Dhasanapongsakul and his colleagues, after you took out the two on the trawler and dumped them in the nets. I saw it the morning after the party. Didn’t notice at the time, but like I said that’s Envoys for you. Just go on acquiring little scraps of data until it means something.”
She was staring intently at the datacoil, but I still spotted the tremor go through her when I said Dhasanapongsakul’s name.
“There were other scraps, once I started to look. The corrosion grenades in the hold. Sure, it took Schneider to shut down the onboard monitors on the Nagini, but you were fucking him. Old flame, in fact. I don’t suppose you had any harder time talking him into it than you did in getting me down to the rec deck at Mandrake. It didn’t fit at first, because you were pushing so hard to get the claim buoy aboard. Why go to the trouble of trying to put the buoys out of commission in the first place, then work so hard to get the remaining one placed.”
She nodded jerkily. Most of her was still dealing with Dhasanapongsakul. I was talking into a vacuum.
“Didn’t make sense, that is, until I thought about what else had been put out of commission. Not the buoys. The ID&A sets. You trashed them all. Because that way no one was going to be able to put Dhasanapongsakul and the rest into virtual and find out what had happened to them. Of course, eventually we’d get them back to Landfall and find out. But then. You didn’t plan for us to make it back, did you?”
That got her back to me. A haggard stare across wreathed smoke.
“You know when I worked most of this out?” I sucked in my own smoke hard. “On the swim back to the gate. See, I was pretty much convinced it’d be closed by the time I got there. Wasn’t quite sure why I thought that at first, but it sort of fell into place. They’d gone through the gate, and the gate had closed on them. Why would that happen, and how did poor old Dhasanapongsakul end up on the wrong side wearing a T-shirt. Then I remember
ed the waterfall.”
She blinked.
“The waterfall?”
“Yeah, any normal human being, post-coital, would have shoved me in the back into that pool and then laughed. We both would have. Instead, you started crying.” I examined the end of my cigarette as if it interested me. “You stood at the gate with Dhasanapongsakul, and you pushed him through. And then you slammed it shut. It doesn’t take two hours to shut that gate, does it, Tanya?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Were you already thinking you might have to do the same thing to me? Then, at the waterfall?”
“I.” She shook her head. “Don’t know.”
“How did you kill the two on the trawler?”
“Stunner. Then the nets. They drowned before they woke up. I.” She cleared her throat. “I pulled them up again later, I was going to, I don’t know, bury them somewhere. Maybe even wait a few days and drag them to the gate, try to open it so I could dump them through as well. I panicked. I couldn’t stand to be there, wondering if Aribowo and Weng might find some way to open the gate again before their air ran out.”
She looked at me defiantly.
“I didn’t really believe that. I’m an archaeologue, I know how…” She was silent for a few moments. “I couldn’t even have opened it again myself in time to save them. It was just. The gate. What it meant. Sitting there on the trawler, knowing they were just the other side of that. Thing, suffocating. Millions of kilometres away in the sky above my head and still right there in the cavern. So close. Like something huge, waiting for me.”
I nodded. Back on the beach at Dangrek, I’d told Wardani and Vongsavath about the corpses I’d found sealed in the substance of the Martian vessel while Carrera and I hunted each other across the hull. But I never told either of them about my last half hour inside the ship, the things I’d seen and heard as I stumbled back out to the echoing desolation of the docking bay with Carrera’s impeller frame on my shoulders, the things I’d felt swimming beside me all the way back to the gate. After a while, my vision had narrowed down to that faint blur of light orbiting out in the blackness, and I didn’t want to look round for fear of what I might see, what might be hunched there, offering me its taloned hand. I just dived for the light, scarcely able to believe it was still there, terrified that at any moment it would slam shut and leave me locked out in the dark.
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