"This way." Hand nodded at the curving wall of alloy before us, and strode in towards a triangular cargo vent near ground level. I caught myself scanning the edifice for possible sniper points, shrugged off the reflex irritably and went after him. The wind swept detritus obligingly out of my way in little knee-high swirls.
Close up, the cargo vent was huge, a couple of metres across at its apex and wide enough at base to permit the pa.s.sage of a trolleyed marauder bomb fuselage. The loading ramp that led up to the entrance had doubled as a hatch when the barge was in flight and now it squatted on ma.s.sive hydraulic haunches that hadn"t worked in decades. At the top the vent was flanked with carefully blurred holographic images that might have been either Martians or angels in flight.
"Dig art," said Hand disparagingly. Then we were past them and into the vaulted gloom beyond.
It was the same feeling of decayed s.p.a.ce that I"d seen on Harlan"s World, but where the Harlan fleet hulks had been preserved with museum sobriety, this s.p.a.ce was filled with a chaotic splatter of colour and sound. Stalls built from bright primary plastics and wire were cabled and epoxied seemingly at random up the curve of the hull and across what remained of the princ.i.p.al decks, giving the impression that a colony of poisonous mushrooms had infected the original structure. Sawn-off sections of companionway and ladders of welded support struts linked it all together. Here and there more holographic art lent extra flare to the glow of lamps and illuminum strips. Music wailed and ba.s.slined unpredictably from hull-mounted speakers the size of crates. High above it all, someone had punched metre-width holes in the hull alloy so that beams of solid sunlight blasted through the gloom at tall angles.
At the impact point of the closest beam stood a tall, raggedly dressed figure, sweat-beaded black face turned up to the light as if it were a warm shower. There was a battered black top hat jammed on his head and an equally well used long black coat draped across his gaunt frame. He heard our steps on the metal and pivoted, arms held cruciform.
"Ah, gentlemen." The voice was a prosthetic bubbling, emitted by a rather obvious leech unit stapled to the scarred throat. "You are just in time. I am Semetaire. Welcome to the Soul Market."
Up on the axial deck, we got to watch the process begin.
As we stepped out of the cage elevator, Semetaire moved aside and gestured with one rag-feathered arm.
"Behold," he said.
Out on the deck, a tracked cargo loader was backing up with a small skip held high in its lifting arms. As we watched, the skip tilted forward and something started to spill over the lip, cascading onto the deck and bouncing up again with a sound like hail stones.
Cortical stacks.
It was hard to tell without racking up the neurachem vision, but most of them looked too bulky to be clean. Too bulky, and too whitish-yellow with the fragments of bone and spinal tissue that still clung to the metal. The skip hinged further back, and the spillage became a rush, a coa.r.s.e white-noised outpouring of metallic shingle. The cargo loader continued to backtrack, laying a thick, spreading trail of the stuff. The hailstorm built to a quick drumming fury, then choked up as the continuing cascade of stacks was soaked up by the mounds that had already fallen.
The skip up-ended, emptied. The sound stopped.
"Just in," observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. "Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid deployment casualties as well. We"re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp"s ground cover pretty badly."
"Not for the first time," I muttered.
"Nor the last, we hope." Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. "Business has rarely been this good."
Something sc.r.a.ped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.
All the way round the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, sc.r.a.ping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel-load rattled in the buckets like gravel.
For all the compet.i.tion for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I guessed and watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.
"Most sell by gross weight," he murmured. "It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire."
"Get to the point," said Hand curtly.
Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man"s voice. "The point," he said courteously, "is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire. What do you you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf?" desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf?"
I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.
Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn"t recognise, and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.
"You are playing a dangerous game," said the Mandrake exec quietly. "And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?"
Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimetres. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.
"Slowly," I suggested.
"There is no problem here, Kovacs." Hand"s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire"s. "The family ties have been established now."
Semetaire"s grin said that wasn"t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn"t show.
"What is it you desire, company man?"
"Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger."
"He"s not talking to you, Kovacs." Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. "Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we"re in a hurry. Whatever you"ve got on the slab."
Semetaire shrugged. "The freshest are here," he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cylinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. "But if you are pressed for time..."
He turned aside and led us to a sombrely-appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the ba.s.s-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors" shovels and buckets behind us.
Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier and she unwound herself languidly from amongst the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.
I glanced at Hand.
"The chosen of Ogon," he said, without apparent irony. "Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors."
He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then, she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.
"How many kilos do you want?" asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.
Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.
"How much are you going to gut me?"
"Seventy-nine fifty the kilo."
The exec grunted. "Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it."
"That"s a dross price and you know it, company man." Semetaire shook his head, smiling. "Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn"t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior cla.s.s, cleaned and anointed, and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other"s time in this way."
"Alright," Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. "You"ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I"ll be back sometime."
"Sometime." Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. "Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead."
"We may indeed." Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. "And some of us sooner than others, if we go round making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire."
The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.
"Where would be the point in arresting me?" he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. "Look at this. Without me, you"d only have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy."
"Sixty-seven fifty, and I"ll make you Mandrake"s preferred supplier."
Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. "Very well," he said finally. "Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos."
"Agreed." Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. "I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up."
Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.
"A find," said Semetaire lightly, and grinned.
One of the crab-legged remotes had returned from the pile and, having reached Semetaire"s foot, was working its way steadily up his trouser leg. When it reached the level of his belt, he plucked it off and held it still while, with the other hand, he prised something from the thing"s mandibles. Then he tossed the little machine away. It drew in its limbs as it sensed the freefall and when it hit the deck, it was a featureless grey ovoid that bounced and rolled to a quick halt. A moment later, the limbs extended cautiously. The remote righted itself and scuttled off about its master"s business.
"Ahhh, look." Semetaire was rubbing the tissue-flecked stack between his fingers and thumb, still grinning. "Look at that, Wedge Wolf. Do you see? Do you see how the new harvest begins?"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
The Mandrake AI read the stack-stored soldiers we"d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data, and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they"d do would be scream themselves hoa.r.s.e.
Hand shrugged it off.
"That"s about standard," he said. "There"s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We"ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters."
I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers" data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional a.n.a.logue.
"Experience of high-rad combat environments?" I looked up at the Mandrake exec. "Is this something I should know about?"
"Come on, Kovacs. You already do."
"I." The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn"t seen light so harsh in geological eons. "Had hoped it wouldn"t turn out that way."
Hand examined the table top as if it needed resheening. "We needed the peninsula cleared," he said carefully. "By the end of the week it will be. Kemp"s pulling back. Call it serendipity."
Once, on reconnaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I"d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail-even with the neurachem racked up to maximum the city looked like a silver bracelet, flung down at the water"s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.
I met Hand"s eyes across the table.
"So we"re all going to die."
He shrugged. "It seems unavoidable, doesn"t it. Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run..."
"Yeah, well in the long run I"ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City."
"Quite."
"What kind of rad-tolerant sleeves you have in mind?"
Another shrug. "Don"t know for sure, I"ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?"
I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.
"I"ll stick with what I"ve got, thanks."
"You don"t trust me?"
"Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn"t it." I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. "This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don"t build better for combat than this stuff."
"And the anti-rad?"
"It"ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we"re done?"
Hand frowned at the question. "Well. Employment."
"They had that. Look where it got them."
"Employment in Landfall in Landfall." For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. "Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?"
I raised an eyebrow.
"Those are three very very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don"t really subscribe to any of them. But if you"re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I"d say so. If it were me, I"d probably want in at that price." tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don"t really subscribe to any of them. But if you"re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I"d say so. If it were me, I"d probably want in at that price."
"A vote of confidence." Hand"s tone was withering. "How rea.s.suring."
"Provided, of course, I didn"t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the back-data."
He looked at me. "Are you trying to be funny?"
"I can"t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city." I shrugged. "Just now, anyway. Maybe that"s just me."
"Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?"
I smiled thinly. "Don"t be absurd, Hand. I"m a soldier."
"Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don"t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune."
"Isn"t it just." I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it was a fused grenade. "So let"s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?"
According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of o.r.g.a.s.m and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.
It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.
The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake AI with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us three hundred and eighty-seven possibles, with a high probability core of two hundred and twelve.
"Time to wake them up," said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.