Then the screams.
He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then, the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.
He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.
I"m sorry.
I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.
When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn"t.
"That"s wonderful," he breathed. "The stuff of epics."
"Stop that," I told him.
"No, but really. We"re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing."
"Well," I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. "You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they"ll make a construct opera out of the f.u.c.king thing."
"You may laugh." There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji"s eyes. "But there"s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we"ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else"s dreams?"
I poured my gla.s.s half full of whisky again. "Kemp manages."
"Oh, that"s politics politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu-" he snapped his fingers. "Come on, you"re from Harlan"s World. What"s that stuff called?"
"Communitarianism."
"Yes, that." He shook his head sagely. "That stuff isn"t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of b.l.o.o.d.y grade school construct. Who"d bite into that, for Samedi"s sake? Where"s the savour? Where"s the blood and adrenalin?"
I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead"s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp"s that the Cartel hadn"t allowed for.
Pity they didn"t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.
I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn"t the Sauberville blend I"d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn"t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.
"Plenty of blood out there at the moment," I observed.
"Yes, now now there is. But that"s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I"ll tell you." there is. But that"s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I"ll tell you."
"Thought you would."
"In less than a year he"d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn"t, his own people would, uh, vote vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him." him out of Indigo City and then do it for him."
"He doesn"t strike me as the sort to go quietly."
"Yes, that"s the problem with voting," said Roespinoedji judiciously. "Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?"
"Kemp? Yeah, a few times."
"And what was he like?"
He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same G.o.dd.a.m.ned f.u.c.king conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.
"Tall," I said. "He was tall."
"Ah. Well, yes, he would be."
I turned to look at the boy beside me. "Doesn"t it worry you, Djoko? What"s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?"
He grinned. "I doubt their political a.s.sessors are any different to the Cartel"s. Everyone has appet.i.tes. And besides. With what you"ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul." His look sharpened. "Allowing that we have dismantled all all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is." your dead hand datalaunch security, that is."
"Relax. I told you, I only ever set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it"d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for."
"Hmm." Roespinoedji rolled whisky around in the base of his gla.s.s. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. "Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?"
I shrugged. "What if? Hand could never risk a.s.suming he"d found all of them, too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff."
"Yes. Well, you"re the Envoy." He prodded at the slim hand-sized slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. "And you"re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognise this broadcast?"
"Trust me." Just the words brought a grin to my lips. "State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission"s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition."
Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. "Alright. Enough. We"ve got an agreement. Don"t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling."
"You"d just better not be f.u.c.king with me," I said amiably.
"I"m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy," he sniffed. "In Landfall, at any rate."
"And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek."
"That"s a strange att.i.tude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world."
"Figure of speech. A good technician. Don"t go cutting corners on me."
"Well, if you don"t trust me," he said huffily, "why don"t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you?"
"She"ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a f.u.c.k-up."
"I"m sure she does. She seems very competent."
I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every manoeuvre and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse, and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.
"Yes. She is."
"You know," Roespinoedji chuckled. "Last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked."
I shivered again. "Yeah. Wasn"t easy."
We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji"s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like woodsmoke from someone else"s beach barbecue.
"Did you give it a name?" Roespinoedji wondered finally. "This starship."
"No, there wasn"t really that kind of time."
"So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?"
I shrugged.
"The Wardani Wardani?"
"Ah." He looked at me shrewdly. "And would she like that?"
I picked up my gla.s.s and drained it.
"How the f.u.c.k would I know?"
She"d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knock-off, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra"s Virtue Angin Chandra"s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji"s place, she locked herself in her room and didn"t come out. like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji"s place, she locked herself in her room and didn"t come out.
I didn"t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it any more and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.
Roespinoedji was sold.
The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji"s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller c.o.c.ktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji"s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instill fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what"s with the sick dude in the suit what"s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.
"It"s cool," she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. "Why don"t you go talk to Tanya. I think she"s got some stuff she needs to say."
"To me?"
The pilot shrugged impatiently. "To someone, and it looks like you"re elected. She won"t talk to me."
"Is she still in her room?"
"She went out." Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that const.i.tuted Dig 27"s town centre. "Go. I"ll watch these guys."
I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the facade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.
She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn"t let go of.
"You following me?"
"Not intentionally," I lied. "Sleep well?"
She shook her head. "I can still hear Sutjiadi."
"Yeah."
When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. "You going in here?"
"Are you f.u.c.king-? No. I only stopped to..." and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.
I peered at the glyphs. "Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?"
She almost smiled.
"No." She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. "It"s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It"s sort of a grafiti as well. It says." She stopped, shook her head again. "There"s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good s.h.i.t before you go up in a populated area."
"You"re winding me up. It doesn"t say that."
"It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too." She turned away. "They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell."
The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.
"I was going to the dighead," she said. "That cafe Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don"t think my stomach will hold anything down, but-"
"Sure. I"ll walk with you."
She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.
"Maybe I should get one of those."
"Barely worth it for the time we"ve got left."
We plodded up the slope.
"You sure this is going to come off?" she asked.
"What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?"
"I think he"s a f.u.c.king merchant, and you can"t trust him any further than Hand."
"Tanya," I said gently. "It wasn"t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji"s getting the deal of the millennium, and he knows it. He"s solid on this one, believe me."
"Well. You"re the Envoy."