"So who would you have gone to?"
I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. "That"s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well," I offered him a small smile of my own. "I"m still listening. What happened next?"
Schneider"s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holop.o.r.n audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.
"What happened?" He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans" gazes were snagged back to the performance. "What happened? This war is what f.u.c.king happened."
CHAPTER THREE.
Somewhere, a baby was crying.
For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I"d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren"t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.
"Hot here."
Schneider had shut down the shuttle"s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under a.s.sault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer waited to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle"s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.
A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.
"Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera"s Wedge," I said briskly. "This is Corporal Schneider. We"re here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation."
The sergeant frowned. "I wasn"t informed of this."
"I"m informing you now, sergeant."
In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely known on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate"s unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant"s throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and women starving in their bubblefabs.
"I"ll have to see some authorisation."
I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn"t been difficult to obtain. In a planet-wide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers lat.i.tudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one had even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I"d had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about south-east of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.
"Will that be sufficient, sergeant?"
He pored over the printout, as if he was hoping the authorisation flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience which was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby"s crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of here.
The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. "You"ll have to see the commandant," he said woodenly. "These people are all under government supervision."
I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.
"Right." I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. "Let"s go talk to the commandant then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won"t take long."
The commandant"s office was in a double-storey "fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early millennium gargoyles and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked sc.r.a.ped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We pa.s.sed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the "fab and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.
Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a moulded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways slumped figure behind the desk.
"Commandant?"
The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.
"What is it, sergeant?"
The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like s.p.a.cesuit armour but wasn"t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was made of lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist and forearm section was set with a half dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.
I stood in front of the desk and saluted.
"Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera"s Wedge," I said softly.
"Well." The commandant struggled upright in his chair. "Perhaps you"d like more light in here, lieutenant. I like the dark, but then," he chuckled behind closed lips. "I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not."
He groped across the keyboard and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.
"Is that better?" The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. "I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World." The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. "A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?"
My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.
"I"d like to have your full attention, commandant."
For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical, to look at the jacked-in cable.
"Oh," he whispered. "This."
Abruptly, he lurched round to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.
"Get out."
The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn"t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them gently pulling the door shut behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.
"Down to a trickle, I a.s.sure you," he said, gesturing at the still winking light. "Probably couldn"t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I"d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically." He made an obvious effort. "So what, may I ask, do Carrera"s Wedge want with me? We"ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I"m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less." Another gesture, this time turned outwards to the bank of monitors. "The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I"ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn"t very far along yet-"
"I haven"t come for your supplies, commandant."
"Ah, then it"s a reckoning, is it. Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel"s scheme of things? Proved an embarra.s.sment to the war effort, perhaps?" The idea seemed to amuse him. "Are you an a.s.sa.s.sin? A Wedge enforcer?"
I shook my head.
"I"m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani."
"Ah yes, the archaeologue."
A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorisation on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.
"Some problem, commandant?" I asked quietly.
He lowered the arm and leant on his elbow, wagging the authorisation to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.
"What do you want her for?" he asked, equally softly. "Little Tanya the Scratcher. What"s she to the Wedge?"
I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn"t be difficult to do, I"d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months, but there was the sergeant outside the door and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn"t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.
"That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?"
But he didn"t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn"t going to give.
Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.
Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.
For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.
"Sergeant," he bellowed hoa.r.s.ely.
The door opened.
"Sergeant, get Wardani out of "fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant"s shuttle."
The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.
"Thank you, commandant." I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.
"Popular woman," he said.
I looked back. "What?"
"Wardani." He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. "You"re not the first."
"Not the first what?"
"Less than three months ago." As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. "We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they"re in, in these parts." His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. "Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her."
I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant"s desk and cradled his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon b.u.mping the roof of a room where the party has long since burnt itself out.
"Lieutenant?"
The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.
"Lieutenant?"
"Coming." I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.
Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.
"Problem?"
"No. Get rid of these kids."
Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child"s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.
"You"re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren"t all bad," I said quietly.
Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. "That"s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show"s over."
The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.
"Where"d you get those things?"
"Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn"t have much use for them."
"No, they"ve already shot all the refugees down there." I nodded at the departing children, now chattering excitedly over their new acquisitions. "The camp militia"ll probably confiscate the lot once we"re gone."
Schneider shrugged. "I know. But I"d already given out the chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?"
It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring out the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.
"Here she comes," said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.
Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgement.
She swayed, stumbled and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.
"Tanya Wardani," said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar code strips and a scanner. "I"ll need your ID for the release."
I c.o.c.ked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impa.s.sively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.
"Lieutenant."
"Yes, what is it?" Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.
"Will she be coming back?"
I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.
"No, sergeant," I said, as if to a small child. "She won"t be coming back. She"s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her."
I closed the hatch.
But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.
He didn"t even bother to shield his face from the dust.