"A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It"ll show up on satellite tracking like a holowh.o.r.e"s chest. And we can"t really afford that, can we?"
"A holowh.o.r.e"s chest? I don"t know, the surgery can"t be that expensive."
Hand c.o.c.ked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. "Very droll. Thank you. We can"t really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?"
"Not if you want an exclusive."
"I think that goes without saying, lieutenant." Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. "So then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit."
"If we want to come out alive, yes."
"Yes." Unexpectedly, Hand rocked back on his heels and dumped himself into a sitting position in the sand. He rested his forearms on his knees and seemed lost in searching the horizon for something. In the dark executive suit and white winged collar, he looked like a sketch by one of the Millsport absurdist school.
"Tell me, lieutenant," he said finally. "a.s.suming we can get the peninsula cleared, in your professional opinion, what"s the lower limit on a support team for this venture? How few can we get away with?"
I thought about it. "If they"re good. Spec ops, not just plankton-standard grunts. Say six. Five, if you use Schneider as flyer."
"Well, he doesn"t strike me as the sort to be left behind while we look after his investment for him."
"No."
"You said spec ops. Do you have any specific skills in mind?"
"Not really. Demolitions, maybe. That rock fall looks pretty solid. And it wouldn"t hurt if a couple of them could fly a shuttle, just in case something happens to Schneider."
Hand twisted his head round to look up at me. "Is that likely?"
"Who knows?" I shrugged. "Dangerous world out there."
"Indeed." Hand went back to watching the place where the sea met the grey of Sauberville"s undecided fate. "I take it you"ll want to do the recruiting yourself."
"No, you can run it. But I want to sit in, and I want veto on anyone you select. You got any idea where you"re going to get half a dozen spec ops volunteers? Without ringing any alarm bells, I mean."
For a moment I thought he hadn"t heard me. The horizon seemed to have him body and soul. Then he shifted slightly and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.
"In these troubled times," he murmured, almost to himself, "it shouldn"t be a problem finding soldiers who won"t be missed."
"Glad to hear it."
He glanced up again and there were still traces of the smile clinging to his mouth.
"Does that offend you, Kovacs?"
"You think I"d be a lieutenant in Carrera"s Wedge if I offended that easily?"
"I don"t know." Hand looked back out to the horizon again. "You"ve been full of surprises so far. And I understand that Envoys are generally pretty good at adaptive camouflage."
So.
Less than two full days since the meeting in the auction hall, and Hand had already penetrated the Wedge datacore and unpicked whatever shielding Carrera had applied to my Envoy past. He was just letting me know.
I lowered myself to the blued sand beside him and picked my own point on the horizon to stare at.
"I"m not an Envoy any more."
"No. So I understand." He didn"t look at me. "No longer an Envoy, no longer in Carrera"s Wedge. This rejection of groupings is verging on pathological, lieutenant."
"There"s no verging about it."
"Ah. I see some evidence of your Harlan"s World origins emerging. The essential evil of ma.s.sed humanity The essential evil of ma.s.sed humanity, wasn"t that what Quell called it?"
"I"m not a Quellist, Hand."
"Of course not." The Mandrake exec appeared to be enjoying himself. "That would necessitate being part of a group. Tell me, Kovacs, do you hate me?"
"Not yet."
"Really? You surprise me."
"Well, I"m full of surprises."
"You honestly have no feelings of rancour towards me after your little run-in with Deng and his squad."
I shrugged again. "They"re the ones with the added ventilation."
"But I sent them."
"All that shows is a lack of imagination." I sighed. "Look, Hand. I knew someone someone in Mandrake would send a squad, because that"s the way organisations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn"t have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully"s nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully"s wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don"t hate you personally, because you haven"t given me any reason to yet." in Mandrake would send a squad, because that"s the way organisations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn"t have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully"s nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully"s wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don"t hate you personally, because you haven"t given me any reason to yet."
"But you hate Mandrake."
I shook my head. "I don"t have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says, rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?"
"People."
"That"s right. People. It"s all people. People and their stupid f.u.c.king groups. Show me an individual decision-maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I"ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I"ll take them all down if I can. But don"t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate."
"How very balanced of you."
"Your government would call it antisocial derangement, and put me in a camp for it."
Hand"s lip curled. "Not my government. We"re just wet-nursing these clowns till Kemp calms down."
"Why bother? Can"t you deal direct with Kemp?"
I wasn"t looking, but I got the sense that his gaze had jerked sideways as I said it. It took him a while to formulate a response he was happy with.
"Kemp is a crusader," he said finally. "He has surrounded himself with others like him. And crusaders do not generally see sense until they are nailed to it. The Kempists will have to be defeated, bloodily and resoundingly, before they can be brought to the negotiating table."
I grinned. "So you"ve tried."
"I didn"t say that."
"No. You didn"t." I found a violet pebble in the sand and tossed it into the placid ripples in front of us. Time to change the subject. "You didn"t say when you were going to get our spec ops escort, either."
"Can"t you guess?"
"The soul markets?"
"Do you have a problem with that?"
I shook my head, but inside me something smoked off the detachment like stubborn embers.
"By the way." Hand twisted around to look back at the rock fall. "I have an alternative explanation for that collapsed cliff."
"You didn"t buy the micrometeorite, then?"
"I am inclined to believe in Mistress Wardani"s velocity brake. It makes sense. As does her circuit-breaker theory, to a point."
"That point being?"
"That if a race as advanced as the Martians appear to have been built a circuit breaker, it would work properly. It would not leak."
"No."
"So we are left with the question. Why, fifty thousand years ago, did this cliff collapse. Or perhaps, why was was it collapsed?" it collapsed?"
I groped around for another pebble. "Yeah, I wondered about that."
"An open door to any given set of coordinates across interplanetary, possibly even interstellar distances. That"s dangerous, conceptually and in fact. There"s no telling what might come through a door like that. Ghosts, aliens, monsters with half-metre fangs." He glanced sideways at me. "Quellists, even."
I found a second, larger stone somewhere back behind me.
"Now that would would be bad," I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. "The end of civilisation as we know it." be bad," I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. "The end of civilisation as we know it."
"Precisely. Something which the Martians, no doubt, also thought of and built for. Along with the power brake and the circuit breaker, they would presumably have a monster-with-half-metre-fangs contingency system."
From somewhere Hand produced a pebble of his own and spun it out over the water. It was a good throw from a seated position, but it still fell a little short of the ripples I had created with my last stone. Wedge-customised neurachem-hard to beat. Hand clucked in disappointment.
"That"s some contingency system," I said. "Bury your gate under half a million tonnes of cliff face."
"Yes." He was still frowning at the impact site of his throw, watching as his ripples merged with mine. "It makes you wonder what they were trying to shut out, doesn"t it."
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
You like him, don"t you?"
It was an accusation, dealt face up in the low gleam from the m.u.f.fled illuminum bar top. Music tw.a.n.ged, irritatingly sweet, from speakers not nearly high enough above our heads. Crouched at my elbow like a large comatose beetle, the personal s.p.a.ce resonance scrambler that Mandrake had insisted we carry at all times showed a clear green functioning light, but apparently wasn"t up to screening out external noise. Pity.
"Like who?" I asked, turning to face Wardani.
"Don"t be obtuse, Kovacs. That slick streak of used coolant in a suit. You"re f.u.c.king bonding with him."
I felt the corner of my mouth quirk. If Tanya Wardani"s archaeologue lectures had seeped into some of Schneider"s speech patterns during their previous a.s.sociation, it looked as if the pilot had given as good as he"d got.
"He"s our sponsor, Wardani. What do you want me to do? Spit at him every ten minutes to remind us all how morally superior we are?" I tugged significantly at the shoulder flash of the Wedge uniform I was wearing. "I"m a paid killer, Schneider here is a deserter and you, whatever your sins may or may not be, are encoded all the way with us in trading the greatest archaeological find of the millennium for a ticket offworld and a lifetime pa.s.s to all the ruling-elite fun-park venues in Latimer City."
She flinched.
"He tried to have us killed."
"Well, given the outcome, I"m inclined to forgive him that one. Deng"s goon squad are the ones who ought to be feeling aggrieved."
Schneider laughed, then shut up as Wardani cut him a freezing stare.
"Yes, that"s right. He sent those men to their deaths, and now he"s cutting a deal with the man who killed them. He"s a piece of s.h.i.t."
"If the worst Hand ever scores is eight men sent to their deaths," I said, more roughly than I"d intended, "then he"s a lot cleaner than me. Or anyone else with a rank that I"ve met recently."
"You see. You"re defending him. You use your own self-hatred to let him slide off the scope and save yourself a moral judgement."
I looked hard at her, then drained my shot gla.s.s and set it aside with exaggerated care.
"I appreciate," I said evenly, "that you"ve been through a lot recently, Wardani. That"s why I"m cutting you some slack. But you"re not an expert on the inside of my head, so I"d prefer it if you"d keep your f.u.c.king amateur psychosurgeon bulls.h.i.t to yourself. OK?"
Wardani"s mouth compressed to a thin line. "The fact remains-"
"Guys," Schneider leaned across Wardani with the rum bottle and filled my gla.s.s. "Guys, this is supposed to be a celebration. If you want to fight, go north, where it"s popular. Right here, right now, I"m celebrating the fact I won"t ever have to get in a fight again, and you two are spoiling my run-up. Tanya, why don"t you-"
He tried to top up Wardani"s gla.s.s, but she pushed the neck of the bottle aside with the edge of one hand. She was looking at him with a contempt that made me wince.
"That"s all that matters to you, Jan, isn"t it," she said in a low voice. "Sliding out from under with heavy credit. The quick-fix, short-cut, easy-solution route to some swimming-pool existence at the top of the pile. What happened to you, Jan? I mean, you were always shallow, but..."
She gestured helplessly.
"Thanks, Tanya." Schneider knocked back his shot, and when I could see his face again, he was grinning fiercely. "You"re right, I shouldn"t be so selfish. I ought to have stuck with Kemp for a while longer. After all, what"s the worst that can happen?"
"Don"t be childish."
"No, really. I see it all so much more clearly now. Takeshi, let"s go tell Hand we"ve changed our minds. Let"s all go down fighting, it"s so much more significant significant." He stabbed a finger at Wardani. "And you. You can go back to the camp we pulled you out of because I wouldn"t want you to miss out on any of this n.o.ble suffering."
"You pulled me out of the camp because you needed me, Jan, so don"t pretend any different."