There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.
‘Nobody down here either,’ said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. ‘Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.’
Sutjiadi frowned. ‘There’s food out?’
‘Yeah, lots of it.’ Deprez hauled himself out of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. ‘Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.’
‘I’ve had parties like that,’ said Vongsavath.
Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.
‘Cruickshank is shooting the rats,’ he said. ‘They are quite large.’ Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. ‘Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?’
‘Rats?’ Deprez’s grin widened. ‘It is hard to tell.’
I repressed a smile of my own.
‘Crew,’ said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. ‘How many crew, sergeant?’
Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. ‘I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.’
‘I used to be a chef,’ said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. ‘Maybe I’ll go down and look.’
‘You stay here.’ Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. ‘Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.’
Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.
‘My kind of work,’ he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.
The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.
‘…is secured.’ It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.
‘Secured how?’ he snapped.
‘We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.’ Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. ‘That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.’
‘What about the uh, the mission objective?’ I broke in. ‘Is it intact?’
Sutjiadi snorted. ‘Is it there?’
I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.
I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.
Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.
‘Yes, it’s here.’ There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. ‘It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.’
‘Sun? Is it open?’
‘Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Wardani? You there?’
‘Busy.’ Her voice was taut. ‘What did you find on the boat?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘Yeah, well. Same here. Out.’
I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.
The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.
Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.
It turned out worth it.
Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.
We stood looking up at them for a while.
‘Good guess,’ I said to Sutjiadi.
‘It made sense to look.’ He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. ‘They’ve been stripped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?’
‘Yeah, but nobody did,’ Vongsavath pointed out.
Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. ‘The war?’
I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. ‘Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.’ I nodded towards the twists of smoke. ‘They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?’
‘Vividly,’ said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.
‘That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.’
‘So why hide these guys at all?’ asked Cruickshank.
I shrugged. ‘Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.’
‘Indigo City,’ said Sutjiadi pointedly.
‘Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.’ Cruickshank grinned. ‘He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a fucking compliment!’
‘Whatever.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.’