‘So who would you have gone to?’
I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. ‘That’s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well.’ I offered him a small smile of my own. ‘I’m still listening. What happened next?’
Schneider’s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.
‘What happened?’ He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans’ gazes were snagged back to the performance. ‘What happened? This war is what fucking happened.’
CHAPTER THREE
Somewhere, a baby was crying.
For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I’d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren’t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.
‘Hot here.’
Schneider had shut down the shuttle’s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer wafted to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle’s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.
A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.
‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said briskly. ‘This is Corporal Schneider. We’re here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation.’
The sergeant frowned. ‘I wasn’t informed of this.’
‘I’m informing you now, sergeant.’
In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely known on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate’s unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came to tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant’s throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and women starving in their bubblefabs.
‘I’ll have to see some authorisation.’
I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain. In a planet-wide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers latitudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one had even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I’d had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about south-east of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.
‘Will that be sufficient, sergeant?’
He pored over the printout, as if he was hoping the authorisation flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience which was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby’s crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of here.
The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. ‘You’ll have to see the commandant,’ he said woodenly. ‘These people are all under government supervision.’
I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.
‘Right.’ I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. ‘Let’s go talk to the commandant then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won’t take long.’
The commandant’s office was in a double-storey ’fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early millennium gargoyles and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the ’fab and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.
Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a moulded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways slumped figure behind the desk.
‘Commandant?’
The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.
‘What is it, sergeant?’
The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armour but wasn’t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was made of lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist and forearm section was set with a half dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.
I stood in front of the desk and saluted.
‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said softly.
‘Well.’ The commandant struggled upright in his chair. ‘Perhaps you’d like more light in here, lieutenant. I like the dark, but then,’ he chuckled behind closed lips. ‘I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.’
He groped across the keyboard and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.
‘Is that better?’ The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. ‘I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.’ The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. ‘A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?’