"You didn"t want to go with them?"
"I was born on Sanction IV. This is my home." Sun looked back at me again. "I imagine you have a problem understanding that."
"Not really. I"ve seen worse places to belong."
"Really?"
"Sure. Sharya for one. Right Right! Go right Go right!"
The bike dipped and banked. Admirable responses from Sun in her new sleeve. I shifted in my saddle, scanning the hillscape. My hands went to the flying grips of the mounted Sunjet set and jerked it down to manual height. On the move it wasn"t much good as an automated weapon without some very careful programming and we hadn"t had time for that.
"There"s something moving out there." I chinned the mike. "Cruickshank, we"ve got movement across here. Want to join the party?"
The reply crisped back. "On our way. Stay tagged."
"Can you see it?" asked Sun.
"If I could see it, I"d have shot it. What about the scope?"
"Nothing so far."
"Oh, that that"s good."
"I think..." We crested a hillock and Sun"s voice came back, cursing, by the sound of it, in Mandarin. She booted the bike sideways and swung about, creeping up another metre from the ground. Peering down over her shoulder, I saw what we"d been looking for.
"What the f.u.c.k f.u.c.k is that?" I whispered. is that?" I whispered.
On another scale, I might have thought I was looking at a recently hatched nest of the bio-engineered maggots they use for cleaning wounds. The grey ma.s.s that writhed on the gra.s.s below us had the same slick-wet consistency and self-referential motion, like a million microscopic pairs of hands washing themselves and each other. But there would have been enough maggots here for every wound inflicted on Sanction IV in the last month. We were looking at a sphere of seething activity over a metre across, pushed gently about on the hillside like a gas-filled balloon. Where the shadow of the bike fell across it, bulges formed on the surface and bulked upwards, bursting like blisters with a soft popping and falling back into the substance of the main body.
"Look," said Sun quietly. "It likes us."
"What the f.u.c.k is it?"
"I didn"t know the first time you asked me."
She nudged the bike back to the slope we"d just crested, and put us down. I lowered the Sunjet discharge channels to focus on our new playmate.
"Do you think this is far enough away?" she asked.
"Don"t worry," I said grimly. "If it even twitches this way, I"m going to blast it apart on general principles. Whatever it is."
"That strikes me as unsophisticated."
"Yeah, well. Just call me Sutjiadi."
The thing, whatever it was, seemed to have calmed down now we no longer cast a shadow on its surface. The internal writhing motion went on, but there was no sign of a coordinated lateral move in our direction. I leaned on the Sunjet mounting and watched, wondering briefly if we weren"t somehow still back in the Mandrake construct, looking at another probability dysfunction like the grey cloud that had obscured Sauberville while its fate was still undecided.
A dull droning reached my ears.
"Here come the blam blam crew." I scanned the ridge northward, spotted the other bike and neurachem"d a close-up. Cruickshank"s hair bannered out against the sky from her perch behind the weaponry. They had the windscreen powered back to a driver"s cone for speed. Hansen drove hunched forward into it, intent. I was surprised at the warm rush the sight kicked off inside me.
Wolf gene splice, I registered irritably. Never shake it Never shake it.
Good old Carrera. Never misses a trick, the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d.
"We should "cast this back to Hand," Sun was saying. "The Cartel archives may have something on it."
Carrera"s voice drifted through my mind.
the Cartel have deployed I looked back at the seething grey ma.s.s with new eyes.
f.u.c.k.
Hansen brought the bike to a juddering halt alongside us and leaned on the handlebars. His brow furrowed.
"Wha-"
"We don"t know what the f.u.c.k it is," Sun broke in tartly.
"Yes we do," I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.
Hand looked impa.s.sively at the projected image for a long moment after Sun froze the film. No one else was looking at the holodisplay any more. Seated in the ring, or crowding in at the bubblefab"s door, they were looking at him.
"Nanotech, right?" Hansen said it for everyone.
Hand nodded. His face was a mask, but to the Envoy-tuned senses I had deployed, the anger came smoking off him in waves.
"Experimental nanotech," I said. "I thought that was a standard scare line, Hand. Nothing to worry about." nanotech," I said. "I thought that was a standard scare line, Hand. Nothing to worry about."
"It usually is," he said evenly.
"I"ve worked with military nanosystems," said Hansen. "And I"ve never seen anything like that."
"No, you wouldn"t have." Hand loosened slightly and leaned forward to gesture at the holodisplay. "This is new. What you"re looking at here is a null configuration. The nan.o.bes have no specific programming to follow."
"So what are they doing?" asked Ameli Vongsavath.
Hand looked surprised. "Nothing. They are doing nothing, Mistress Vongsavath. Exactly that. They feed off the radiation from the blast, they reproduce at a modest rate and they. Exist. Those are the only designed parameters."
"Sounds harmless," said Cruickshank dubiously.
I saw Sutjiadi and Hansen exchange glances.
"Harmless, certainly, as things stand now." Hand hit a stud on his chair"s board and the frozen image vanished. "Captain, I think it"s best if we wrap this up for now. Would I be right in a.s.suming the sensors we have strung should warn us of any unforeseen developments ahead of time?"
Sutjiadi frowned.
"Anything that moves will show up," he agreed. "But-"
"Excellent. Then we should all get back to work."
A murmur ran round the briefing circle. Someone snorted. Sutjiadi snapped icily for quiet. Hand stood up and pushed through the flap to his quarters. Ole Hansen jerked his chin after the executive, and a ripple of supportive muttering broke out. Sutjiadi reprised his shut-the-f.u.c.k-up frost, and started handing out tasks.
I waited it out. The members of the Dangrek team drifted out in ones and twos, the last of them ushered out by Sutjiadi. Tanya Wardani hovered briefly at the door to the bubblefab on her way out, looking in my direction, but Schneider said something in her ear and the two of them followed the general flow. Sutjiadi gave me a hard stare when he saw I was staying, but he walked away. I gave it another couple of minutes, then got up and went to the flap of Hand"s quarters. I touched the chime and walked in.
Hand was stretched out on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling. He barely looked in my direction.
"What do you want, Kovacs?"
I snapped out a chair and sat in it. "Well, less tinsel than you"re currently deploying would be a start."
"I don"t believe I"ve told any lies to anyone recently. And I try to keep track."
"You haven"t told much truth either. Not to the grunts anyway, and with spec ops, I think that"s a mistake. They aren"t stupid."
"No, they aren"t stupid." He said it with the detachment of a botanist labelling specimens. "But they"re paid, and that"s as good or better."
I examined the side of my hand. "I"ve been paid too, but that won"t stop me ripping your throat out if I find you"re trying to tinsel me."
Silence. If the threat bothered him, it didn"t show.
"So," I said at last, "you going to tell me what"s going on with the nanotech?"
"Nothing is going on going on. What I told Mistress Vongsavath was accurate. The nan.o.bes are in a null configuration because they are doing precisely nothing."
"Come on, Hand. If they"re doing nothing, then what are you so bent out of shape about?"
He stared at the ceiling of the bubblefab for a while. He seemed fascinated by the dull grey lining of the bubblefab"s ceiling. I was on the point of getting up and hauling him bodily off the bed, but something in the Envoy conditioning held me in place. Hand was working through something.
"Do you know," he murmured, "the great thing about wars like this?"
"Keeps the population from thinking too hard?"
A faint smile flitted across his face.
"The potential for innovation," he said.
The a.s.sertion seemed to give him sudden energy. He swung his feet off the bed and sat up, elbows on knees, hands clasped. His eyes bored into mine.
"What do you think of the Protectorate, Kovacs?"
"You"re joking, right?"
He shook his head. "No games. No entrapment. What"s the Protectorate to you?"
"The skeletal grip of a corpse"s hand round eggs trying to hatch?"
"Very lyrical, but I didn"t ask you what Quell called it. I asked what you think."
I shrugged. "I think she was right."
Hand nodded.
"Yes," he said simply. "She was right. The human race has straddled the stars. We"ve plumbed the insides of a dimension we have no senses to perceive in order to do it. We"ve built societies on worlds so far apart that the fastest ships we have would take half a millennium to get from one side of our sphere of influence to the other. And you know how we did all that?"
"I think I"ve heard this speech."
"The corporations did it. Not governments. Not politicians. Not this f.u.c.king joke Protectorate we pay lip service to. Corporate planning gave us the vision, corporate investment paid for it, and corporate employees built it."
"Let"s hear it for the corporations." I patted my palms together, half a dozen dry strokes.
Hand ignored it. "And when we were done, what happened? The UN came and they muzzled us. They stripped us of the powers they"d awarded us for the diaspora. They levied their taxes again, they rewrote their protocols. They castrated castrated us." us."
"You"re breaking my heart, Hand."
"You"re not funny, Kovacs. Do you have any idea what technological advances we might have made by now if that muzzle hadn"t gone back on. Do you know how fast fast we were during the diaspora?" we were during the diaspora?"
"I"ve read about it."
"In s.p.a.ceflight, in cryogenics, in bioscience, in machine intelligence." He ticked them off on bent-back fingers. "A century of advances in less than a decade. A global tetrameth rush for the entire scientific community. And it all stopped with the Protectorate protocols. We"d have f.u.c.king faster-than-light s.p.a.ceflight by now if they hadn"t stopped us. Guaranteed."
"Easy to say now. I think you"re omitting a few inconvenient historical details, but that"s not really the point. You"re trying to tell me the Protectorate has unwritten the protocols for you, just so you can get this little war won at speed?"
"In essence, yes." His hands made shaping motions in the s.p.a.ce between his knees. "It"s not official, of course. No more than all those Protectorate dreadnoughts that aren"t officially anywhere near Sanction IV. But unofficially, every member of the Cartel has a mandate to push war-related product development to the hilt, and then further."
"And that"s what"s squirming around out there? Pushed-to-the-hilt nanoware?"
Hand compressed his lips. "SUS-L. Smart Ultra Short-Lived nan.o.be systems."
"Sounds promising. So what does it do?"
"I don"t know."
"Oh for f-"
"No." He leaned forward. "I don"t don"t know. None of us do. It"s a new front. They"re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems." know. None of us do. It"s a new front. They"re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems."
"The OPERN System? That"s just so so f.u.c.king cute. And it"s a weapon?" f.u.c.king cute. And it"s a weapon?"
"Of course it is."