Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.
Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.
Right, Takeshi?
My face twitched.
If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent re-sleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.
Don’t expect anything and—
And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.
Don’t—
Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.
This fucking war.
And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colours. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.
Sold.
CHAPTER TEN
Dangrek.
The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.
A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.
‘Should be colder than this,’ he said.
‘Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.’ I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. ‘This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?’
‘Not as yet.’ Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. ‘Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes…’
He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.
‘It’ll do,’ she said distantly. ‘I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.’
‘Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.’ A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.
‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Of course. This way.’
She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.
A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.
I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.
We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—
I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.
‘Hand. What’s that?’
‘That?’ He saw where I was pointing. ‘Oh, that. Grey area.’
‘I can see that.’ Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. ‘What’s it doing there?’
But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the pre-knowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rock fall.
Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.
‘It’s Sauberville,’ she said flatly. ‘Isn’t it?’
Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. ‘That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The MAI posits a fifty per cent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.’
A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of a hundred and twenty thousand.
‘Reduced how?’ I asked.
Hand shrugged. ‘It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.’
‘Tactical nuke,’ said Schneider tonelessly. ‘Riding a marauder delivery system.’
‘Well, it’s what he’s got.’ Hand shrugged again. ‘And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.’
‘Motherfucking psycho,’ said Schneider, apparently to the sky.
Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she was trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.
‘So.’ Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. ‘Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.’