I shrugged again. ‘This isn’t anything we haven’t already discussed.’
‘No.’ She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. ‘I just didn’t think you’d be so, fucking, congenial with that piece of corporate shit.’
I sighed.
‘Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He’ll do the job we want him to do. That’s what counts. We’ve been paid, we’re on board and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I’m concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I’ll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?’
Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. ‘You’d better hope this isn’t tagged. If Hand’s listening to you…’
‘Well,’ I reached across her and picked up Schneider’s untouched drink. ‘If he is, he’s probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here’s to mistrust and mutual deterrence.’
I knocked back the rum and upended the glass on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.
‘Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need.’
‘What you need,’ I said, yawning, ‘is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew.’
‘I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn’t an issue.’
I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. ‘Yeah, well. Probably isn’t, but we’re supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be bloody-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think, want to walk?’
‘Going to hold my hand?’ It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other’s personal space.
The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.
I turned to crush out my cigarette.
‘Sure,’ I said, trying for lightness. ‘It’s dark out there.’
I pocketed the scrambler, and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.
It’s dark out there.
Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The top three floors of the Mandrake Tower were executive residential, access barred from below and topped off with a multilevel roof complex of gardens and cafés. A variable permeate power screen strung from parapet pylons kept the sun finetuned for luminous warmth throughout the day, and in three of the cafés, you could get breakfast at any hour. We got it at midday and were still working our way through the last of the spread when an immaculately-attired Hand came looking for us. If he’d been listening in to last night’s character assassination, it didn’t seem to have upset him much.
‘Good morning Mistress Wardani. Gentlemen. I trust your night out on the town proved worth the security risk.’
‘Had its moments.’ I reached out and speared another dim sum parcel with my fork, not looking at either of my companions. Wardani had in any case retreated behind her sunlenses the moment she sat down, and Schneider was brooding intently on the dregs in his coffee cup. The conversation had not been sparkling so far. ‘Sit down, help yourself.’
‘Thank you.’ Hand hooked out a chair and seated himself. On closer inspection, he looked a little tired around the eyes. ‘I’ve already had lunch. Mistress Wardani, the primary components from your hardware list are here. I’m having them brought up to your suite.’
The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.
Don’t ask.
‘Well. We’re about ready to recruit, lieutenant, if you—’
‘Fine.’ I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. ‘Let’s go.’
No one said anything. Schneider didn’t even look up, but Wardani’s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.
We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator which named each floor for us as we passed it and outlined a few of Mandrake’s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-glass walls of the basement level. Iluminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing and on the far side of the open space a blob of hard sunlight signalled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-coloured cruiser was waiting.
‘Thaisawasdi Field,’ said Hand, leaning into the driver’s compartment. ‘The Soul Market.’
The engine note dialled up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automould cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarised glass of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly towards the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiralled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.
Hand touched a stud on the door and the glass polarised blue.
‘You were followed last night,’ he said matter of factly.
I glanced across the compartment at him. ‘What for? We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’
‘Not by us.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that’s how we spotted them. But I’m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider – which incidentally wasn’t all that intelligent – and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn’t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge.’
‘How many?’
‘Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved.’
‘Did you pick them up?’
‘No.’ Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. ‘The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they’d gone to ground near the Latimer canal head and by the time we got there, they were gone. We looked, but…’
He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He’d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.
‘What are you grinning about?’
‘Sorry. Just touched. Protect and retrieve, huh?’
‘Ha ha.’ He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. ‘So, is there something you want to tell me?’
I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.
‘Are you certain?’
‘Hand, be serious. If I’d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they’d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?’
‘So who were they?’
‘I thought I just told you I didn’t know. Street scum, maybe?’
He gave me a pained look. ‘Street scum following a Carrera’s Wedge uniform?’
‘OK, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You’ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven’t you?’
‘Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn’t notice them, how likely is it they were that low-grade?’