Schneider"s open hand was well into the swing before I realised he intended to hit her. My neurachem-aided responses got me there in time to lock down the slap, but I had to lunge across Wardani to do it and my shoulder must have knocked her off the stool. I heard her yelp as she hit the floor. Her drink went over and spilled across the bar.
"That"s enough," I told Schneider quietly. I had his forearm flattened to the bar under mine, and my other hand floating in a loose fist back at my left ear. My face was close enough to his to see the faint tear sheen on his eyes. "I thought you didn"t want to fight any more."
"Yeah." It came out strangled. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, that"s right."
I felt him relax, and unlocked on his arm. Turning, I saw Wardani picking her stool and herself up from the floor. Behind her, a few of the bar"s table occupants had come to their feet and were watching uncertainly. I met their eyes, and they seated themselves hurriedly. A graft-heavy tactical marine in one corner lasted longer than the rest, but in the end even she sat down, unwilling to tussle with the Wedge uniform. Behind me, I felt more than saw the bartender clearing up the spilled drink. I leaned back on the newly dried surface.
"I think we"d better all calm down, agreed?"
"Suits me." The archaeologue set her stool back on its feet. "You"re the one that knocked me over. You and your wrestling partner."
Schneider had hooked the bottle and was pouring himself another shot. He downed it and pointed at Wardani with the empty gla.s.s.
"You want to know what happened to me, Tanya? You-"
"I have a feeling you"re going to tell me."
"-really want to know? I got to watch a six-year-old-girl. f.u.c.king die of shrapnel. f.u.c.king shrapnel wounds that I f.u.c.king inflicted because she was hiding in an automated bunker I rolled f.u.c.king grenades into." He blinked and trickled more rum into his gla.s.s. "And I"m not going to f.u.c.king watch anything like that ever again. I"m out, whatever it takes. However shallow shallow that makes me. For your f.u.c.king information." that makes me. For your f.u.c.king information."
He looked back and forth between us for a couple of seconds, as if he couldn"t honestly remember who either of us were. Then he got off his stool and walked an almost straight line to the door and out. His last drink stood untouched on the muted glow of the bar top.
"Oh s.h.i.t," said Wardani, into the small silence left beside the drink. She was peering into her own empty gla.s.s as if there might be an escape hatch at the bottom.
"Yeah." I wasn"t about to help her get off the hook with this one.
"You think I should go after him?"
"Not really, no."
She put down the gla.s.s and fumbled for cigarettes. The Landfall Lights pack I"d noticed in the virtuality came out and she fed herself one mechanically. "I didn"t mean..."
"No, I thought you probably didn"t. So will he, once he sobers up. Don"t worry about it. He"s most likely been carrying that memory around in sealwrap since it happened. You just fed him enough catalyst to vomit it up. Probably better that way."
She breathed the cigarette into life and glanced sideways at me through the smoke. "Does none of this touch you any more?" she asked. "How long does it take to get like that?"
"Thank the Envoys. It"s their speciality. How long is a meaningless question. It"s a system. Psychodynamic engineering."
This time she turned on her stool and stayed facing me. "Doesn"t that ever make you angry? That you"ve been tampered with like that?"
I reached across for the bottle, and topped up both our drinks. She made no move to stop me. "When I was younger, I didn"t care. In fact, I thought it was great. A testosterone wet dream. See, before the Envoys, I served in the regular forces and I"d already used a lot of quickplant jack-in software. This just seemed like a super-ramped version of the same thing. Body armour for the soul. And by the time I got old enough to think any differently, the conditioning was in to stay."
"You can"t beat it? The conditioning?"
I shrugged. "Most of the time, I don"t want to. That"s the nature of good conditioning. And this is a very superior product. I work better when I go with it. Fighting it is hard work, and it slows me down. Where did you get those cigarettes?"
"These?" She looked down at the packet absently. "Oh, Jan, I think. Yeah, he gave them to me."
"That was nice of him."
If she noticed the sarcasm in my voice, she didn"t react. "You want one?"
"Why not? By the look of it, I"m not going to be needing this sleeve much longer."
"You really think we"re going to get as far as Latimer City." She watched me shake out a cigarette and draw it to life. "You trust Hand to keep his side of this bargain?"
"There"s really very little point in him double crossing us." I exhaled and stared at the smoke as it drifted away across the bar. A ma.s.sive sense of departure from something was coursing unlooked-for through my mind, a sense of unnamed loss. I groped after the words to sew everything back together again. "The money"s already gone, Mandrake can"t get it back. So if it cuts us out, all Hand saves himself is the cost of the hypercast and three off-the-rack sleeves. In return for which he gets to worry forever about automated reprisals."
Wardani"s gaze dropped to the resonance scrambler on the bar. "Are you sure this thing is clean?"
"Nope. I got it from an indie dealer, but she came Mandrake-recommended, so it could be tagged for all I know. It doesn"t really matter. I"m the only person who knows how the reprisals are set up, and I"m not about to tell you about it."
"Thanks." There was no appreciable irony in her tone. An internment camp teaches you things about the value of not knowing.
"Don"t mention it."
"And what about silencing us after the event?"
I spread my hands. "What for? Mandrake isn"t interested in silence. This"ll be the biggest coup a single corporate ent.i.ty have ever pulled off. It"ll want it known. Those time-locked data launches we set are going to be the oldest news on the block when they finally decay. Once Mandrake has got your starship hidden away somewhere safe, it"ll be dropping the fact through every major corporate dataport on Sanction IV. Hand"s going to use this to swing instant membership of the Cartel, and probably a seat on the Protectorate Commercial Council into the bargain. Mandrake"ll be a major player overnight. Our significance in that particular scheme of things will be nil."
"Got it all worked out, huh?"
I shrugged again. "This isn"t anything we haven"t already discussed."
"No." She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. "I just didn"t think you"d be so, f.u.c.king, congenial with that piece of corporate s.h.i.t."
I sighed.
"Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He"ll do the job we want him to do. That"s what counts. We"ve been paid, we"re on board and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I"m concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I"ll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?"
Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. "You"d better hope this isn"t tagged. If Hand"s listening to you..."
"Well," I reached across her and picked up Schneider"s untouched drink. "If he is, he"s probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here"s to mistrust and mutual deterrence."
I knocked back the rum and upended the gla.s.s on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.
"Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need."
"What you need," I said, yawning, "is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew."
"I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn"t an issue."
I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. "Yeah, well. Probably isn"t, but we"re supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be b.l.o.o.d.y-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think, want to walk?"
"Going to hold my hand?" It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other"s personal s.p.a.ce.
The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.
I turned to crush out my cigarette.
"Sure," I said, trying for lightness. "It"s dark out there."
I pocketed the scrambler, and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.
It"s dark out there.
Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
The top three floors of the Mandrake Tower were executive residential, access barred from below and topped off with a multilevel roof complex of gardens and cafes. A variable permeate power screen strung from parapet pylons kept the sun fine-tuned for luminous warmth throughout the day, and in three of the cafes, you could get breakfast at any hour. We got it at midday and were still working our way through the last of the spread when an immaculately-attired Hand came looking for us. If he"d been listening in to last night"s character a.s.sa.s.sination, it didn"t seem to have upset him much.
"Good morning Mistress Wardani. Gentlemen. I trust your night out on the town proved worth the security risk."
"Had its moments." I reached out and speared another dim sum parcel with my fork, not looking at either of my companions. Wardani had in any case retreated behind her sunlenses the moment she sat down, and Schneider was brooding intently on the dregs in his coffee cup. The conversation had not been sparkling so far. "Sit down, help yourself."
"Thank you." Hand hooked out a chair and seated himself. On closer inspection, he looked a little tired around the eyes. "I"ve already had lunch. Mistress Wardani, the primary components from your hardware list are here. I"m having them brought up to your suite."
The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.
Don"t ask.
"Well. We"re about ready to recruit, lieutenant, if you-"
"Fine." I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. "Let"s go."
No one said anything. Schneider didn"t even look up, but Wardani"s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.
We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator which named each floor for us as we pa.s.sed it and outlined a few of Mandrake"s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-gla.s.s walls of the bas.e.m.e.nt level. Iluminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing and on the far side of the open s.p.a.ce a blob of hard sunlight signalled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-coloured cruiser was waiting.
"Thaisawasdi Field," said Hand, leaning into the driver"s compartment. "The Soul Market."
The engine note dialled up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automould cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarised gla.s.s of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly towards the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiralled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.
Hand touched a stud on the door and the gla.s.s polarised blue.
"You were followed last night," he said matter of factly.
I glanced across the compartment at him. "What for? We"re on the same side, aren"t we?"
"Not by us." He made an impatient gesture. "Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that"s how we spotted them. But I"m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider-which incidentally wasn"t all that intelligent-and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn"t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge."
"How many?"
"Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved."
"Did you pick them up?"
"No." Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. "The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they"d gone to ground near the Latimer ca.n.a.l head and by the time we got got there, they were gone. We looked, but..." there, they were gone. We looked, but..."
He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He"d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.
"What are you grinning about?"
"Sorry. Just touched. Protect and retrieve, huh?"
"Ha ha." He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. "So, is there something you want to tell me?"
I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.
"Are you certain?"
"Hand, be serious. If I"d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they"d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?"
"So who were they?"
"I thought I just told you I didn"t know. Street sc.u.m, maybe?"
He gave me a pained look. "Street sc.u.m following a Carrera"s Wedge uniform?"
"OK, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You"ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven"t you?"
"Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn"t notice them, how likely is it they were that low-grade?"
I sighed. "Not very."
"Precisely. So who else is trying to carve themselves a slice of artefact pie?"
"I don"t know," I admitted gloomily.
The rest of the flight pa.s.sed in silence.
Finally, the cruiser banked about and I tipped a glance out of the window. We were spiralling down towards what looked like a sheet of dirty ice littered with used bottles and cans. I frowned and recalibrated for scale.
"Are these the original-?"
Hand nodded. "Some of them, yes. The big ones. The rest are impounds, stuff from when the bottom fell out of the artefact market. Soon as you can"t pay your landing slot, they grab your haulage and grav-lift it out here until you do. Of course, with the way the market went, hardly anyone bothered even trying to pay off what they owed, so the Port Authority salvage crews went in and decommissioned them with plasma cutters."
We drifted in over the nearest of the grounded colony barges. It was like floating across a vast felled tree. Up at one end, the thrust a.s.semblies that had propelled the vessel across the gulf between Latimer and Sanction IV were spread like branches, crushed to the landing field underneath and fanned stiffly against the hard blue sky above. The barge would never lift again, had in fact never been intended for more than a one-way trip. a.s.sembled in orbit around Latimer a century ago, built only for the long blast across interstellar s.p.a.ce and a single planetfall at journey"s end, she would have burnt out her antigrav landing system coming down. The detonation of the final touchdown repulsor jets would have fused the desert sand beneath into an oval of gla.s.s that would eventually be extended by engineers to join the similar ovals left by other barges and so create Thaisawasdi Field, to serve the fledgling colony for the first decade of its life.
By the time the corporates got round to building their own private fields and the a.s.sociated complexes, the barges would have been gutted, used initially to live out of, then as a ready source of refined alloys and hardware to build from. On Harlan"s World, I"d been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalised, carved back to multilevelled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull. Only the hulls themselves were ever left intact, out of some bizarre quasi-reverence of the kind that in earlier ages got successive generations to give up their lives to build cathedrals.
The cruiser crossed the spine of the barge and slid down the curve of the hull to a soft landing in the pool of shadow cast by the grounded vessel. We climbed out into sudden cool and a quiet broken only by the whisper of a breeze across the gla.s.s plain and, faintly, the human sounds of commerce from within the hull.