‘Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.’
It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.
‘Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.’ He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. ‘I really appreciate you not ah, not—’
‘Forget it. I had.’
‘Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.’ – I stirred impatiently – ‘Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—’
‘Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.’ I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. ‘All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?’
He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.
‘Exactly,’ he said.
‘Exactly what?’
Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.
‘Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.’
‘I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.’
He shrugged. ‘Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?’
I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. ‘Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—’
‘Politics.’ Schneider waved a hand dismissively. ‘This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of their annual profits to own.’
I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical attention that – at a pro-government estimate – half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.
I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.
‘Alright.’
‘You’re in?’
‘I’m listening,’ I said mildly. ‘Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.’
Schneider sucked in his cheeks. ‘I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, lieutenant. I need—’
‘You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?’
There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.’
‘Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.’
I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.
But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn’t show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.
‘The Es, huh? When did you serve?’
‘A while ago. Why?’
‘You at Innenin?’
His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I was falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.
I closed my eyes briefly.
‘Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?’
Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.
‘Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?’
Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.
It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.
This success, plus the scattered ruins and artefacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up, designed by the UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilisation is still out there somewhere. My own personal favourite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilisation.