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I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.
On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping’s microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.
“Take a look.” Sun glanced round at me, and cleared her throat. “It’s what you said.”
“Then I don’t need to look.”
“You’re saying these are the nanobes?” asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. “Not—”
“The gate isn’t even fucking open, Sutjiadi.” I could hear the fraying in my own voice.
Sun peered again into the microscope’s screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.
“It’s an interlocking configuration,” she said. “But the components don’t actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It’s like a, I don’t know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nanobe generates a portion of the field and that’s what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just passes through it. It might vaporise a few individual nanobes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that’s not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing’s organic.”
Hand looked down at me curiously. “You knew this?”
I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.
I made an effort to hold it down.
“I worked it out. In the firefight.” I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me too. “Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don’t work, because we’ve already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They’ve evolved to beat it, and now they’ve got conferred immunity to beam weapons.”
“And the ultravibe?” Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.
She shook her head. “I’ve passed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nanobes resonate inside the field, but it doesn’t damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam.”
“Solid ammunition’s the only thing that works,” said Hand thoughtfully.
“Yeah, and not for much longer.” I got up to leave. “Give them some time, they’ll evolve past that too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later.”
“Where are you going, Kovacs?”
“If I were you, Hand, I’d get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they’re likely to start growing longer arms.”
I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch to his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank’s Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three metres below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.
I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.
Cruickshank flickered through my head. Gri
Stop that.
I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.
“Kovacs.” He crouched to my level and started again. “Kovacs, I am sorry. She was a fine sol—”
The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backwards with the shock.
“Shut up Jiang.” I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. “You say one more fucking word and I’ll paint Luc with your brains.”
I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung onto it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.
One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There’d been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.
From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn’t muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.
Did I not tell you there was work for me here?
I closed my eyes.
Where is my antiperso
I don’t—
Are you looking for me now?
I don’t do that shit no more.
Laughter, like the gravel of cortical stacks pouring from a skip.
“Kovacs?”
I looked up. It was Luc Deprez.
“I think you had better come upstairs,” he said.
Over our heads, the noise seemed to have quietened down.
“We are not,” said Hand quietly, looking around the cabin, “I repeat, not leaving here without staking a Mandrake claim on the other side of that gate. Read the terms of your contracts. The phrasing every available avenue of opportunity is paramount and omnipresent. Whatever Captain Sutjiadi orders you to do now, you will be executed and returned to the soul dumps if we leave without exploring those avenues. Am I making myself clear?”
“No, you’re not,” shouted Ameli Vongsavath through the co
“We can scan for the nanobes—” But angry voices trampled Hand down. He raised his hands over his head in exasperation. Sutjiadi snapped for quiet, and got it.
“We are soldiers.” Jiang spoke unexpectedly into the sudden lull. “Not Kempist conscripts. This is not a fighting chance.”
He looked around, seeming to have surprised himself as much as anyone else.
“When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,” Hand said, “you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That’s what I’m buying from you now.”
Jiang looked at him with open disdain. “I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.”
“Oh, Damballah,” Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. “What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think paid for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for me. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.”
“Hand.” I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the centre of the cabin. “I think your sales technique’s flagging. Why don’t you give it rest?”
“Kovacs, I am not—”
“Sit down.” The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.
Faces turned expectantly in my direction.
Not this again.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We can’t. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can’t. Not until we’ve placed the buoy.”
I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.