In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.
Schneider grinned. ‘You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Yeah, well just hear me out.’ He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. ‘See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us, not like us physically, I mean we assume their civilisation had the same cultural bases as ours.’
Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.
‘That means, we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centres of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light years out from the main Latimer system, that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins, but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re doing and comes rushing across.’
‘I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.’
At sub-light speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.
‘Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?’
I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.
‘So then,’ he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, ‘you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first come, first served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.’
‘For a percentage.’
‘Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.’
‘How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist. ’
He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot’s Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.
I shrugged. ‘Nice work. And?’
‘I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—’
‘Scratchers?’
Schneider blinked. ‘Yeah. What about it?’
‘This isn’t my planet,’ I said patiently, ‘I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?’
‘Oh. You know, kids.’ He gestured, perplexed. ‘Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.’
‘Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?’
‘What?’ he blinked again.
‘Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?’
Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.
‘They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.’
‘Or turn up too late to get a better stake.’
‘Yeah.’ For some reason he didn’t like that crack either. ‘Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something.’
‘Found what?’
‘A Martian starship.’ Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Intact.’
‘Crap.’
‘Yes, we did.’
I sighed again. ‘You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn’t got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?’
Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.
‘I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.’
‘A gate?’ Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. ‘You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?’
‘Kovacs, it’s a gate.’ Schneider spoke as if to a small child. ‘We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.’
‘Into the ship?’ Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.’
‘Or a shuttle.’ I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. ‘What were you flying?’
He grimaced. ‘Piece of shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.’
‘What?’ I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. ‘Wouldn’t fit?’
‘Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,’ said Schneider morosely. ‘Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole programme.’
‘No one had a spacesuit?’
‘What for?’ Schneider spread his hands. ‘It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ’cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?’
‘Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?’
‘Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?’
I shrugged. ‘Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.’
Schneider skinned me a tight grin. ‘You don’t think we could have handled selling to the corporates?’
‘I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on who you were dealing with.’