‘Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it.’ Hand’s urbane tone was edged with irritation. ‘But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.’
‘I was going to say,’ Sutjiadi said evenly, ‘that the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.’
Wardani looked up from her sketching.
‘Well that’s good, captain,’ she said brightly. ‘You’ve gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours real time. What exactly are you concerned about?’
Sutjiadi looked uncomfortable.
‘This artefact,’ he said. ‘You claim it’s a gate. Can you give me any guarantees that nothing will come through it from the other side?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Do you have any idea what might come through?’
Wardani smiled. ‘Not really, no.’
‘Then I’m sorry, Mistress Wardani. It makes military sense to have the Nagini’s main weaponry trained on it at all times.’
‘This is not a military operation, captain.’ Hand was working on ostentatiously bored now. ‘I thought I made that clear during briefing. You are part of a commercial venture, and the specifics of our commerce dictate that the artefact cannot be exposed to aerial view until it is contractually secured. By the terms of the Incorporation Charter, that will not become the case until what is on the other side of the gateway is tagged with a Mandrake ownership buoy.’
‘And if the gate chooses to open before we are ready, and something hostile comes through it?’
‘Something hostile?’ Wardani set aside her memoryboard, apparently amused. ‘Something such as what?’
‘You would be in a better position than I to evaluate that, Mistress Wardani,’ said Sutjiadi stiffly. ‘My concern is simply for the safety of this expedition.’
Wardani sighed.
‘They weren’t vampires, captain,’ she said wearily.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The Martians. They weren’t vampires. Or demons. They were just a technologically advanced race with wings. That’s all. There’s nothing on the other side of that thing,’ she stabbed a finger in the general direction of the rocks, ‘that we won’t be able to build ourselves in a few thousand years. If we can get a lock on our militaristic tendencies, that is.’
‘Is that intended as an insult, Mistress Wardani?’
‘Take it any way you like, captain. We are, all of us, already, dying slowly of radiation poisoning. A couple of dozen kilometres in that direction a hundred thousand people were vaporised yesterday. By soldiers.’ Her voice was starting to rise, trembling at base. ‘Anywhere else on about sixty per cent of this planet’s land mass, your chances of an early, violent death are excellent. At the hands of soldiers. Elsewhere, the camps will kill you with starvation or beatings if you step out of political line. This service too, brought to us by soldiers. Is there something else I can add to clarify my reading of militarism for you?’
‘Mistress Wardani.’ Hand’s voice held a tight strain I hadn’t heard before. Below the ramp, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang had stopped what they were doing and were looking over towards the raised voices. ‘I think we’re getting off the point. We were discussing security.’
‘Were we?’ Wardani forced a shaky laugh, and her voice evened out. ‘Well, captain. Let me put it to you that in the seven decades I have been a qualified archaeologue, I have never come across evidence to suggest that the Martians had anything more unpleasant to offer than what men like you have already unleashed across the face of Sanction IV. Excluding the small matter of the fallout from Sauberville, you are probably safer sitting in front of that gate than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere at the moment.’
There was a small silence.
‘Maybe you want to train the Nagini’s main guns on the entrance to the cavern,’ I suggested. ‘Same effect. In fact, with the remote monitoring in place, it’ll be better. If the monsters with half-metre fangs turn up, we can collapse the tunnel on them.’
‘A good point.’ Seemingly casual, Hand moved to position himself carefully in the hatch between Wardani and Sutjiadi. ‘That seems the best compromise, does it not, captain?’
Sutjiadi read the executive’s stance and took the hint. He threw a salute and turned on his heel. As he went down the ramp past me, he glanced up. He didn’t quite have his previous immobility of feature down with the new Maori face. He looked betrayed.
You find innocence in the strangest places.
At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.
‘Hansen,’ he snapped tightly. ‘Jiang. Get all of this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred metres from the ship on all sides.’
Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking – he’d already stalked away towards the water’s edge.
Something wasn’t right.
Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a skirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ’fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms, separated by a central living space but two of the units had been assembled in a non-standard configuration with half the bedspace, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.
I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.
The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.
‘It’s me.’
‘I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?’
‘An invitation over the threshold?’
She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.
‘We’re not in virtual any more, Kovacs. I—’
‘I wasn’t looking for a fuck.’
She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. ‘That’s just as well.’
‘So do I get to come in?’
‘Suit yourself.’
I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme – sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.
‘Getting anywhere?’
‘Slowly.’ She yawned. ‘I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.’
I propped myself against a table edge.
‘So how long do you reckon?’
She shrugged. ‘A couple of days. Then there’s testing.’
‘How long for that?’
‘The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?’
I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131 and all their numerous friends, like a ’methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin, and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jewelled presence.