I sighed. ‘Here we go.’
They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.
‘Remain still! Raise your hands!’
I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.
‘I’m not pissing about here, folks!’
‘We’re injured,’ I called back. ‘Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout failsafes. It’s all over. Go wake Hand up.’
Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal cord with a metal stylus.
‘Molecular acid canister,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Last year’s Shorn Biotech. I didn’t realise the Kempists had these yet.’
‘They’ve got everything you’ve got, Hand. They’ve just got a lot less of it, that’s all. Read your Brankovitch. “Trickledown in War-based Markets”.’
‘Yes, thank you, Kovacs.’ Hand rubbed at his eyes. ‘I already have a doctorate in Conflict Investment. I don’t really need the gifted amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.’
I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.
‘We were fucking,’ she said.
Hand blinked.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Already.’
‘What’s that supposed t—’
‘Kovacs, please. You’re giving me a headache.’ He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad who was hovering nearby. ‘OK, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c221mh, central clearing’ll let you have the codes.’
We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket, and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.
‘Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,’ he said. ‘Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.’
Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.
‘Someone with wires to the inside too,’ I added sombrely. ‘Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there’s no way they got in here without help. You’ve got leakage.’
‘Yes, so it would appear.’
‘Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar night before last?’
Wardani looked at me, alarmed.
‘Someone followed us?’
I gestured at Hand. ‘So he says.’
‘Hand?’
‘Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.’ He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. ‘It was Deng, I think.’
‘Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?’
‘Deng had a clone on ice,’ he snapped back. ‘That’s standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counselling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.’
‘Was he? Why don’t you call him?’
I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.
Just killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.
Hand had his audio phone open.
‘Wake up Deng Zhao Jun please.’ He waited. ‘I see. Well, try that then.’
I shook my head.
‘That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.’
Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.
‘Hand, I practically told him to do it.’ I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. ‘Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.’
‘I did not assign Deng, goddamn you Kovacs.’ He was hanging onto his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. ‘And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes this is Hand.’
He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.
‘Deng left the tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.’
‘Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?’
‘Kovacs.’ The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Alright? I don’t. Want to hear it.’
I shrugged.
‘No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.’ Hand breathed out, compressed.
‘I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.’ He turned on his heel. ‘You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.’
I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.
Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.
‘Oh.’ He turned to face us. ‘By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred per cent casualties.’
I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.
Hand stood there and watched it happen.
‘Thought you’d both like to know that,’ he said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dangrek.
The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.
At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.
‘Proud of yourself, Kovacs?’
Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from further up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.
I went after her.
‘You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,’ I told her when I caught up. ‘And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.’
‘Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.’
It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it non-stop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.
The MAI had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating grey fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.