Tetrameth hallucination, I told myself later, and that was just going to have to do.
“So why didn’t you take the trawler?”
She shook her head again and stubbed out her cigarette.
“I panicked. I was cutting the stacks out of the two in the nets, and I just.” She shivered. “It was like something was staring at me. I dumped them back in the water, threw the stacks out to sea as far as I could. Then I just ran away. Didn’t even try to blow the cavern or cover my tracks. Walked all the way into Sauberville.” Her voice changed in some way I couldn’t define. “I got a ride with this guy in a ground car the last couple of klicks. Young guy with a couple of kids he was bringing back from a grav-gliding trip. I guess they’re all dead now.”
“Yes.”
“I. Sauberville wasn’t far enough. I ran south. I was in the Bootkinaree hinterlands when the Protectorate signed the accords. Cartel forces picked me up from a refugee column. Dumped me in the camp with the rest of them. At the time, it seemed almost like justice.”
She fumbled out a fresh cigarette and fitted it in her mouth. Her gaze slanted my way.
“That make you laugh?”
“No.” I drained my coffee. “Point of interest, though. What you were doing around Bootkinaree? Why not head back for Indigo City? You being a Kempist sympathiser and all.”
She grimaced. “I don’t think the Kempists would have been pleased to see me, Takeshi. I’d just killed their entire expedition. Would have been a little hard to explain.”
“Kempists?”
“Yeah.” There was a gritted amusement in her tone now. “Who’d you think bankrolled that trip? Vacuum gear, drilling and construction equipment, the analogue units and the dataprocessing system for the gate. Come on, Takeshi. We were on the edge of a war. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Who’d you think went in and wiped the gate from the Landfall archive?”
“Like I said,” I muttered. “I didn’t want to think about it. So it was a Kempist gig. So why’d you waste them?”
“I don’t know,” she gestured. “It seemed like. I don’t know, Kovacs.”
“Fair enough.” I crushed out my cigarette, resisted the temptation to take another, then took it anyway. I watched her and waited.
“It.” She stopped. Shook her head. Started again, enunciating with exasperated care. “I thought I was on their side. It made sense. We all agreed. In Kemp’s hands the ship would be a bargaining chip the Cartel couldn’t ignore. It could win the war for us. Bloodlessly.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then we found out it was a warship. Aribowo found a weapons battery up near the prow. Pretty unmistakable. Then another one. I, uh.” She stopped and sipped some water. Cleared her throat again. “They changed. Almost overnight, they all changed. Even Aribowo. She used to be so… It was like possession. Like they’d been taken over by one of those sentiences you see in experia horror flicks. Like something had come through the gate and…”
Another grimace.
“I guess I never knew them all that well after all. The two on the trawler, they were cadres. I didn’t know them at all. But they all went the same way. All talking about what could be done. The necessity of it, the revolutionary need. Vaporise Landfall from orbit. Power up whatever drives the ship had, they were speculating FTL now, talking about taking the war to Latimer. Doing the same thing there. Planetary bombardment. Latimer City, Portausaint, Soufriere. All gone, like Sauberville, until the Protectorate capitulated.”
“Could they have done that?”
“Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.” She shrugged. “Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing fucking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government channels, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Cant, political theory, all to shore up the use of a planetary massacre machine. And I’d given it to them. Without me, I don’t think they could have got the gate open again. They were just Scratchers. They needed me. They couldn’t get anyone else, the Guild Masters were all already on their way back to Latimer in cryocap liners, way ahead of the game, or holed up in Landfall waiting for their Guild-paid hypercasts to come through. Wang and Aribowo came looking for me in Indigo City. They begged me to help them. And I did.” There was something like a plea in her face as she turned to look at me. “I gave it to them.”
“But you took it away again,” I said gently.
Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.
“Were you planning to do the same to us?” I asked, when she seemed to have calmed. She tried to withdraw her hand, but I held onto it.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said urgently. “These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.”
A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was just surviving.”
“Good enough,” I told her.
We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.
Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.
I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.
“I hope he doesn’t come here,” she muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.”
“Will they let him come?”
She shrugged. “Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the running himself.” She shook her head. “But it’ll kill him. His precious Martians, fighting and dying in cohorts just like humans. Mass graves and planetary wealth condensed into war machines. It tears down everything he wanted to believe about them.”
“Well, predator stock…”
“I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old fucking song.”
“Same old fucking universe,” I pointed out gently.
“It’s just…”
“At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. “They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like running from a bomb blast. Like putting your hands out to stop a bullet.”
“And then the hull what, melted?”
She shook her head
again, slowly. “I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,” she gestured, “I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.”
I shivered a little, remembering.
“It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,” she went on. “What we saw didn’t come close.”
I grunted. “Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?”
“No.”
“He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.”
She stopped in the street to look at me.
“Look, if it did…”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.”
“It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.”
“Statistically,” she breathed.
“Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?”
“Astronomical.”
“And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.”
“Unless.”
I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.
“That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.”
“We would have seen it,” she said uncertainly. “By now, we would have spotted some of them.”
“Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.”
She laughed, or something very like it.
“You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.”
I built another smile. “No. I’m not Wycinski, either.”
The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.
“Yeah?”
“Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.”
I looked at Wardani and sighed. “Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.”
I pocketed the phone and started down the street again. Wardani followed.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr. I’m-Not-Wycinski?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.”
“Yes.”
The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.
She’d be alright.
It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.
It felt like a scab coming off.
“One thing,” I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.
“Yeah?”
“What do you want me to do with your share of the money?”
She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.
“Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.”
“Right.”
Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.
EPILOGUE
The Angin Chandra’s Virtue blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She’s already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualise, but even that’s pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she’ll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She’s not a deep space vessel, she’s not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she’ll get where she’s going in her own time.
Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji’s contractors have done us proud. There’s a shoreline in wind- and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water’s edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sunblasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five metres of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicoloured fish down there, in amongst the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortification.
The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there’s enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoration and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.
During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evenings, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you’re going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn’t any night sky you’d see from the pilot deck of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue right now—one of the contractors told me they’ve drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.
As afterlives go, it’s not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect—not nearly restricted enough entry for one thing—but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the Tanya Wardani are locked into. If the Chandra’s deserted decks and corr
idors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it’s an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.
But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them are interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.
Sutjiadi didn’t make it either. His stack was the only one I didn’t turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn’t know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all of our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.
Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they re-sleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I’m buying.
Sutjiadi.
Cruickshank.
Hansen.
Jiang.
Some would say we got off lightly.
Sometimes, when I’m sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whisky, I almost agree.
Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly-dressed construct modelled after a Hun Home Settlement Years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She’s rarely gone more than half an hour.
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