My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.
‘I’d like to have your full attention, commandant.’
For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical, to look at the jacked-in cable.
‘Oh,’ he whispered. ‘This.’
Abruptly, he lurched round to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.
‘Get out.’
The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them gently pulling the door shut behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.
‘Down to a trickle, I assure you,’ he said, gesturing at the still winking light. ‘Probably couldn’t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.’ He made an obvious effort. ‘So what, may I ask, do Carrera’s Wedge want with me? We’ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I’m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.’ Another gesture, this time turned outwards to the bank of monitors. ‘The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I’ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn’t very far along yet—’
‘I haven’t come for your supplies, commandant.’
‘Ah, then it’s a reckoning, is it? Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel’s scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?’ The idea seemed to amuse him. ‘Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?’
I shook my head.
‘I’m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.’
‘Ah yes, the archaeologue.’
A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorisation on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.
‘Some problem, commandant?’ I asked quietly.
He lowered the arm and leant on his elbow, wagging the authorisation to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.
‘What do you want her for?’ he asked, equally softly. ‘Little Tanya the Scratcher. What’s she to the Wedge?’
I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn’t be difficult to do, I’d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months, but there was the sergeant outside the door and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn’t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.
‘That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?’
But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.
Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.
Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.
For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.
‘Sergeant,’ he bellowed hoarsely.
The door opened.
‘Sergeant, get Wardani out of ’fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant’s shuttle.’
The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.
‘Thank you, commandant.’ I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.
‘Popular woman,’ he said.
I looked back. ‘What?’
‘Wardani.’ He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. ‘You’re not the first.’
‘Not the first what?’
‘Less than three months ago.’ As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. ‘We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they’re in, in these parts.’ His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. ‘Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.’
I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant’s desk and cradled his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon bumping the roof of a room where the party has long since burnt itself out.
‘Lieutenant?’
The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.
‘Lieutenant?’
‘Coming.’ I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.
Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.
‘Problem?’
‘No. Get rid of these kids.’
Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child’s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.
‘You’re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren’t all bad,’ I said quietly.
Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. ‘That’s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show’s over.’
The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.
‘Where’d you get those things?’
‘Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn’t have much use for them.’