"I, uh, I, thanks." I got upright. "Thanks for the push."
He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn"t even warm.
The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand"s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head c.o.c.ked.
"...vacs, an... me-... ow.-peat, re... ow..."
"Say. Again?" Jiang, s.p.a.cing his words.
"-saiiii...-port no...-"
Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.
What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert a.s.sault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.
Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini Nagini"s drives powering up. The covert a.s.sault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang pa.s.sed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.
A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.
The Nagini Nagini"s ultravibe battery firing in a confined s.p.a.ce.
I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view, painted b.l.o.o.d.y from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini Nagini"s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.
In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.
I made a sound and he looked up.
"Jiang?"
"This." He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it"s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. "Is. Jiang. This is." His fists knotted up. "f.u.c.k."
At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sn.i.g.g.e.red at us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.
A Man Down is not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.
Most tight spec ops units like to sing that particular song; the Envoy Corps certainly did. But in the face of modern weaponry it"s getting harder and harder to sing it with a straight face. The ultravibe cannon had splashed Jiang Jianping evenly across ten square metres of docking bay deck and containing wall. None of the shredded and shattered tissue was any more solid than the stuff dripping off Luc Deprez. We walked back and forth through it for a while, sc.r.a.ping streaks in it with our boots, crouching to check tiny black clots of gore, but we found nothing.
After ten minutes, Deprez said it for us both.
"We are wasting our time, I think."
"Yeah." I lifted my head as something belled through the hull beneath our feet. "I think Vongsavath was right. We"re taking fire."
"We go back?"
I remembered the induction rig and hooked it back on. Whoever had been yelling at us previously had given up; there was nothing on the channel but interference and a weird sobbing that might have been a carrier wave.
"This is Kovacs. Repeat, this is Kovacs. Status please."
There was a long pause, then Sutjiadi"s voice crashed in the mike.
"-pened?-e...-aw... launch. Schnei-...-ay?"
"You"re breaking up, Markus. Status please. Are we under attack?"
There was a burst of distortion and what sounded like two or three voices trying to break in over Sutjiadi. I waited.
Finally, it was Tanya Wardani that came through, almost clear.
"...-ack here,...-acs...-afe. We...-ny,...-ger.-peat, no... da...-ger."
The hull sang out again, like a struck temple gong. I looked dubiously down at the deck beneath my feet.
"Safe, did you say?"
"-essss...-o dang-...-ack immedi-...-afe.-peat, safe."
I looked at Deprez and shrugged.
"Must be a new definition of the word."
"Then we go back?"
I looked around, up at the stacked snake-body tiers of the docking bay, then back at his gore-painted face. Decided.
"Looks that way." I shrugged again. "It"s Wardani"s turf. She hasn"t been wrong yet."
Back on the platform, the Martian datasystems had settled to a brilliant constellation of purpose, while the humans stood beneath it all and gaped like worshippers getting an unexpected miracle.
It wasn"t hard to see why.
An array of screens and displays was st.i.tched across the s.p.a.ce around the central structure. Some were obvious a.n.a.logues of any dreadnought"s battle systems, some defied comparison with anything I"d ever seen. Modern combat gives you a familiarity with compound datadisplay, an ability to glean the detail you need from a dozen different screens and readouts at speed and without conscious thought. Envoy Corps conditioning refines the skill even further, but in the ma.s.sive radiant geometries of the Martian datasystem, I could feel myself floundering. Here and there, I spotted comprehensible input, images that I could relate back to what I knew was happening in the s.p.a.ce around us, but even amongst these elements there were chunks missing where the screens gave out frequencies for unhuman eyes. Elsewhere, I couldn"t have told if the displays were complete, defective or totally fried.
Of the identifiable dataware, I spotted real-time visual telemetry, multi-coloured spectrograph sketches, trajectory mappers and battle dynamic a.n.a.lytical models, blast yield monitors and graphic magazine inventory, something that might have been grav gradient notation...
Centre screen in every second display, the attacker came on.
Skating down the curve of solar gravity at a rakish side-on angle, she was a slim, surgical-looking fusion of rods and elliptical curves that screamed warship warship. Hard on the heels of the thought, the proof dumped itself in my lap. On a screen that did not show real s.p.a.ce, weaponry winked at us across the emptiness. Outside the dome, the shields our host had thrown up shimmered and fluoresced. The ship"s hull shuddered underfoot.
Meaning...
I felt my mind dilate as I got it.
"Don"t know what those are," said Sun conversationally, as I arrived at her side. She seemed entranced by what she was watching. "Faster-than-light weaponry at any rate; she"s got to be nearly an astronomical unit out and we"re getting hit instantaneously every time. They don"t seem to do much damage, though."
Vongsavath nodded. "Prelim systems scramblers, I"d guess. To f.u.c.k up the defence net. Maybe it"s some kind of grav disruptor, I"ve heard Mitoma are doing research into-" she broke off. "Look, here comes the next torpedo spread. Man, that"s a lot lot of hardware for a single launch." of hardware for a single launch."
She was right. The s.p.a.ce ahead of the attacking vessel had filled up with tiny golden traces so dense they could have been interference across the surface of the screen. Secondary displays yanked in detail and I saw how the swarm wove intricate mutual distract-and-protect evasion across millions of kilometres of s.p.a.ce.
"These are FTL too, I think." Sun shook her head. "The screens deal with it somehow, gives a representation. I think this has all already happened."
The vessel I was standing on thrummed distantly, separate vibrations coming in from a dozen different angles. Outside, the shields shimmered again, and I got the vague sense of a shoal of something dark slipping out in the microsecond pulses of lowered energy.
"Counterlaunch," said Vongsavath with something like satisfaction in her voice. "Same thing again."
It was too fast to watch. Like trying to keep track of laser fire. On the screens, the new swarm flashed violet, threading through the approaching sleet of gold and detonating in blots of light that inked out as soon as they erupted. Every flash took specks of gold with it until the sky between the two vessels emptied out.
"Beautiful," breathed Vongsavath. "f.u.c.king beautiful."
I woke up.
"Tanya, I heard the word "safe." " I gestured up at the battle raging in rainbow representation over our heads. "You call this safe safe?"
The archaeologue said nothing. She was staring at Luc Deprez"s bloodied face and clothing.
"Relax, Kovacs." Vongsavath pointed out one of the trajectory mappers. "It"s a cometary, see. Wardani read the same thing off the glyphs. Just going to swing past and trade damage, then on and out again."
"A cometary cometary?"
The pilot spread her hands. "Post-engagement graveyard orbit, automated battle systems. It"s a closed loop. Been going on for thousands of years, looks like."
"What happened to Jan?" Wardani"s voice was stretched taut.
"He left without us." A thought struck me. "He made the gate, right? You saw that?"
"Yeah, like a p.r.i.c.k up a c.u.n.t," said Vongsavath with unexpected venom. "Man could fly when he needed to. That was my f.u.c.king ship."
"He was afraid," said the archaeologue numbly.
Luc Deprez stared at her out of his blood-masked face. "We were all afraid, Mistress Wardani. It is not an excuse."
"You fool." She looked around at us. "All of you, you f.u.c.king. Fools. He wasn"t afraid of this. This f.u.c.king. Light show Light show. He was afraid of him him."
The jerked nod was for me. Her eyes nailed mine.
"Where"s Jiang?" asked Sun suddenly. In the storm of alien technology around us, it had taken that long to notice the quiet ninja"s absence.
"Luc"s wearing most of him," I said brutally. "The rest is lying back on the docking bay floor, courtesy of the Nagini Nagini"s ultravibe. I guess Jan must have been afraid of him as well, huh Tanya?"
Wardani"s gaze flinched aside.
"And his stack?" Nothing showed on Sutjiadi"s face, but I didn"t have to see it. The wolf splice custom was dying to give me the same sinus-aching ride back behind the bridge of my nose.
Pack member down.
I locked it down with Envoy displacement trickery. Shook my head.
"Ultravibe, Markus. He got the full blast."
"Schneider-" Vongsavath broke off and had to start again. "I will-"
"Forget about Schneider," I told her, "He"s dead."
"Get in the queue."
"No, he"s dead, Ameli. Really dead." And as their eyes fixed on me, as Tanya Wardani looked back disbelieving. "I mined the Nagini Nagini"s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporised the minute he crashed the gate. Be lucky if there"s tinsel left."
Over our heads, another wave of gold and violet missiles found each other in the machine dance and, flickering, wiped each other out.
"You blew up the Nagini?" It was hard to tell what Vongsavath was feeling, her voice was so choked. "You blew up my ship?"
"If the wreckage is so dispersed," said Deprez thoughtfully, "Carrera may a.s.sume we were all killed in the explosion."
"If Carrera is actually out there, that is." Hand was looking at me the way he"d looked at the songspires. "If this isn"t all an Envoy ploy."
"Oh, what"s the matter, Hand? Did Schneider try to cut some kind of deal with you when you went walkabout?"
"I have no idea what you"re talking about, Kovacs."
Maybe he didn"t. I was abruptly too weary to care one way or the other.
"Carrera will come out here whatever happens." I told them. "He"s thorough that way, and he"ll want to see the ship. He"ll have some way of standing down the nan.o.be system. But he won"t come yet. Not with little pieces of the Nagini Nagini littering the landscape, and emissions pick-up from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That"s going to back him up a little. It gives us some time." littering the landscape, and emissions pick-up from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That"s going to back him up a little. It gives us some time."
"Time to do what?" asked Sutjiadi.
The moment hung, and the Envoy crept out to play in it. Across splayed peripheral vision, I watched their faces and their stance, measured the possible allegiances, the possible betrayals. Locked down the emotions, peeled away the useful nuances they could give me, and dumped the remainder. Tied the wolf pack loyalty off, smothered whatever feeling still swam murkily in the s.p.a.ce between Tanya Wardani and myself. Descended into the structured cold of Envoy mission time. Decided, and played my last card.
"Before I mined the Nagini Nagini, I stripped the s.p.a.cesuits off the corpses we recovered, and stashed them in a recess in the first chamber outside the docking bay. Leaving aside the one with the blasted helmet, that"s four viable suits. They"re standard issue pull-ons. The airpacks will replenish from unpressured atmosphere environments like this one. Set the valves, they just suck it up. We leave in two waves. Someone from the first wave comes back with spare suits."
"All this," jeered Wardani, "with Carrera waiting on the other side of the gate to snap us up. I don"t think so."
"I"m not suggesting we do it now," I said quietly. "I"m just suggesting we go back and recover the suits while there"s time."
"And when Carrera comes aboard? What do you suggest we do then?" The hatred welling up in Wardani"s face was one of the uglier things I"d seen recently. "Hide from him?" from him?"
"Yes." I watched for reactions. "Exactly that. I suggest we hide. We move deeper into the ship and we wait. Whatever team Carrera deploys will have enough hardware to find traces of us in the docking bay and other places. But they won"t find anything that can"t be explained by our presence here before we all boarded the Nagini Nagini and blew ourselves to tinsel. The logical thing to do is a.s.sume that we all died. He"ll do a sweep, he"ll deploy a claim buoy, just the way we planned to, and then he"ll leave. He doesn"t have the personnel or the time to occupy a hulk over fifty klicks long." and blew ourselves to tinsel. The logical thing to do is a.s.sume that we all died. He"ll do a sweep, he"ll deploy a claim buoy, just the way we planned to, and then he"ll leave. He doesn"t have the personnel or the time to occupy a hulk over fifty klicks long."