"So how does it work?"
"Kovacs, you don"t listen." There was a dreary kind of enthusiasm building in his voice now. "It"s an evolving system. Smart Smart evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way-imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we"re only just starting to map what it evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way-imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we"re only just starting to map what it can can do. They"ve modelled it in high-speed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like gra.s.shoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact." do. They"ve modelled it in high-speed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like gra.s.shoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact."
"Oh. Good."
"It shouldn"t take that turn out here-there"s not the density of military personnel for it to be an evolutionarily selective trait."
"But it could do pretty much anything else."
"Yes." The Mandrake exec looked at his hands. "I would imagine so. Once it goes active."
"And how long have we got before that happens?"
Hand shrugged. "Until it disturbs Sutjiadi"s sentry systems. As soon as they fire on it, it starts evolving to cope."
"And if we go blast it now? Because I know that"s going to be Sutjiadi"s vote."
"With what? If we use the UV in the Nagini Nagini, it"ll just be ready for the sentry systems that much faster. If we use something else, it"ll evolve around that and probably go up against the sentries that much tougher and smarter. It"s nanoware nanoware. You can"t kill nan.o.bes individually. And some always survive. f.u.c.k, Kovacs, eighty per cent kill rate is what our labs work off as an evolutionary ideal. It"s the principle of the thing. Some survive, the toughest motherf.u.c.kers, and those are the ones that work out how to beat you next time around. Anything Anything, anything at all you do to kick it out of the null configuration just makes things worse."
"There must be some way to shut it down."
"Yes, there is. All you need are the project termination codes. Which I don"t have."
The radiation or the drugs, whatever it was, I felt suddenly tired. I stared at Hand through gritted up eyes. Nothing to say that wouldn"t be a rant along the lines of Tanya Wardani"s tirade against Sutjiadi the night before. Waste of warm air. You can"t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their s.h.i.t behind, and someone else to carry on.
Hand cleared his throat. "If we"re lucky, we"ll be out of here before it gets very far advanced."
"If Ghede is on our side, don"t you mean?"
He smiled. "If you like."
"You don"t believe a word of that s.h.i.t, Hand."
The smile wiped away. "How would you know what I believe?"
"OPERNS. SUS-L. You know the acronyms. You know the construct-run results. You know this f.u.c.king programme hardware and soft. Carrera warned us about nanotech deployment, you didn"t blink. And now suddenly you"re p.i.s.sed-off and scared. Something doesn"t fit."
"That"s unfortunate." He started to get up. "I"ve told you as much as I"m going to, Kovacs."
I beat him to his feet and drew one of the interface guns, right-handed. It clung to my palm like something feeding.
"Sit down."
He looked at the levelled gun- "Don"t be ridiculou-"
-then at my face, and his voice dried up.
"Sit. Down."
He lowered himself carefully back to the bed. "If you harm me, Kovacs, you"ve lost everything. Your money on Latimer, your pa.s.sage offworld-"
"From the sound of it, I don"t look much like collecting at the moment anyway."
"I"m backed up, Kovacs. Even if you kill me, it"s a wasted bullet. They"ll re-sleeve me in Landfall and-"
"Have you ever been shot in the stomach?"
His eyes snapped to mine. He shut up.
"These are high-impact fragmentation slugs. Close-quarters antipersonnel load. I imagine you saw what they did to Deng"s crew. They go in whole and they come out like monomol shards. I shoot you in the gut and it"ll take you the best part of a day to die. Whatever they do with your stored self, you"ll go through that here and now. I died that way once, and I"m telling you, it"s something you want to avoid."
"I think Captain Sutjiadi might have something to say about that."
"Sutjiadi will do what I tell him, and so will the others. You didn"t make any friends in that meeting, and they don"t want to die at the hands of your evolving nan.o.bes any more than I do. Now suppose we finish this conversation in a civilised fashion."
I watched him measure the will in my eyes, in my gathered stance. He"d have some diplomatic psychosense conditioning, some learned skill at gauging these things, but Envoy training has a built-in capacity to deceive that leaves most corporate bioware standing. Envoys project pure from a base of synthetic belief. At that moment, I didn"t even know myself whether I was going to shoot him or not.
He read real intent. Or something else cracked. I saw the moment cross his face. I put up the smart gun. I didn"t know which way it would have gone. You very often don"t. Being an Envoy is like that.
"This doesn"t go outside the room," he said. "I"ll tell the others about SUS-L, but the rest we keep at this level. Anything else will be counterproductive."
I raised an eyebrow. "That bad?"
"It would appear," he spoke slowly, as if the words tasted bad. "That I have overextended myself. We"ve been set up."
"By?"
"You wouldn"t know them. Compet.i.tors."
I seated myself again. "Another corporation?"
He shook his head. "OPERNS is a Mandrake package. We bought in the SUS-L specialists freelance, but the project is Mandrake"s. Sealed up tight. These are execs inside Mandrake, jockeying for position. Colleagues."
The last word came out like spit.
"You got a lot of colleagues like that?"
That raised a grimace. "You don"t make friends in Mandrake, Kovacs. a.s.sociates will back you as far as it pays them to. Beyond that, you"re dead in the water if you trust anyone. Comes with the territory. I"m afraid I have miscalculated."
"So they deploy the OPERN systems in the hope you won"t come back from Dangrek. Isn"t that kind of short-sighted? In view of why we"re here, I mean?"
The Mandrake exec spread his hands. "They don"t know why we"re here. The data"s sealed in the Mandrake stack, my access only. It will have cost them every favour they own just to find out I"m down here in the first place."
"If they"re looking to take you down here..."
He nodded. "Yeah."
I saw new reasons why he wouldn"t want to take a bullet out here. I revised my estimate of the face-down. Hand hadn"t cracked, he"d calculated.
"So how safe is your remote storage?"
"From outside Mandrake? Pretty much impregnable. From inside?" He looked at his hands. "I don"t know. We left in a hurry. The security codes are relatively old. Given time."
He shrugged.
"Always about time, huh?"
"We could always pull back," I offered. "Use Carrera"s incoming code to withdraw."
Hand smiled tightly.
"Why do you think Carrera gave us that code? Experimental nanotech is locked up under Cartel protocols. In order to deploy it, my enemies would have to have influence at War Council level. That means access to the authorisation codes for the Wedge and anyone else fighting on the Cartel side. Forget Carrera. Carrera"s in their pocket. Even if it wasn"t at the time Carrera gave it out, the incoming code is just a missile tag waiting to go operative now." The tight smile again. "And I understand the Wedge generally hit what they"re shooting at."
"Yeah." I nodded. "Generally, they do."
"So." Hand got up and walked to the window flap opposite his bed. "Now you know it all. Satisfied?"
I thought it through.
"The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is..."
"That"s right." He didn"t look away from the window. "A transmission detailing what we"ve found and the serial number of the claim buoy deployed to mark it as Mandrake property. Those are the only things that"ll put me back into the game at a level high enough to trump these infidels infidels."
I sat there for a while longer, but he seemed to have finished, so I got up to leave. He still didn"t look at me. Watching his face, I felt an unlooked-for twinge of sympathy for him. I knew what miscalculation felt like. At the exit flap, I paused.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Maybe you"d better say some prayers," I told him. "Might make you feel better."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
Wardani worked herself grey.
She attacked the gate"s impa.s.sive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the a.s.sembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the sc.r.a.ps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.
When she was there, I stayed out of the way and watched her hunched figure through the "fab flap from a vantage point on the loading hatch of the Nagini Nagini. Close-focus neurachem reeled in the image and gave me her face intent over the sketchboard or the chiploader deck. When she went to the cave, I stood amidst the chaos of discarded technoglyph sketching on the floor of the bubblefab and watched her on the wall of monitors.
She wore her hair pulled severely back, but strands got out and rioted on her forehead. One usually made it down the side of her face, and left me with a feeling I couldn"t put in place.
I watched the work, and what it did to her.
Sun and Hansen watched their remote-sentry board, in shifts.
Sutjiadi watched the mouth of the cave, whether Wardani was working there or not.
The rest of the crew watched half-scrambled satellite broadcasts. Kempist propaganda channels when they could get them, for the laughs, government programming when they couldn"t. Kemp"s personal appearances drew jeers and mock shootings of the screen, Lapinee recruitment numbers drew applause and chant-alongs. Somewhere along the line, the spectrum of response got blurred into a general irony and Kemp and Lapinee started getting each other"s fanmail. Deprez and Cruickshank drew beads on Lapinee whenever she cropped up, and the whole crew had Kemp"s ideological speeches down, chanting along with full body language and demagogue gestures. Mostly, whatever was on kick-fired much-needed laughter. Even Jiang joined in with the pale flicker of a smile now and then.
Hand watched the ocean, angled south and east.
Occasionally, I tipped my head back to the splatter of starfire across the night sky, and wondered who was watching us.
Two days in, the remotes drew first blood on a nan.o.be colony.
I was vomiting up my breakfast when the ultravibe battery cut loose. You could feel the thrum in your bones and the pit of your stomach, which didn"t help much.
Three separate pulses. Then nothing.
I wiped my mouth clean, hit the bathroom niche"s disposal stud and went out onto the beach. The sky was nailed down grey to the horizon, only the persistent smouldering of Sauberville to mar it. No other smoke, no rinsed-out splash of fireglow to signify machine damage.
Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.
"You feel that?"
"Yeah." I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. "Looks like we"ve engaged."
She glanced sideways at me. "You OK?"
"Threw up. Don"t look so smug. Couple of days, you"ll be at it yourself."
"Thanks."
The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.
"That"s the bead," said Cruickshank. "The first three were tracking shots. Now it"s locked on."
"Good."
The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal pa.s.sages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.
"Do you mind?"
"Oh. Sorry." She looked away.
I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.
f.u.c.k.
"Where"s Sutjiadi?"