and Wardani
Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered… if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there
‘I don’t see it, somehow.’
‘Wardani was in an internment camp.’
‘Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.’
Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.
‘Alright, my crew,’ he glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. ‘They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have got to them in that time.’
‘Do you trust Semetaire?’
‘I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.’
‘I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?’
Hand rolled his eyes.
‘Alright, who? Who’s your money on?’
‘There is another possibility you’re not considering.’
He looked across at me. ‘Oh, please. Not the half-metre fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.’
I shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an expedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and,’ I jabbed a thumb at the floor, ‘we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.’
Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. ‘Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?’
‘Not that they noticed, no.’ I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. ‘But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of… I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.’
Hand snorted. ‘Which does what exactly?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.’ I saw the way they were both looking at me. ‘Alright, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.’
‘Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defence mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency. ’
‘You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?’
Hand shrugged. ‘Ask Kemp. He did it.’
‘Alright then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that levelled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?’
‘Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?’ Hand looked sceptical. ‘After a year? Come on.’
‘But what if you can’t stop it,’ I said softly.
It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.
‘What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioural protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.’
‘Eva—’ Hand saw where it was going and shut up.
‘You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.’
The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.
‘You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction IV?’ asked Hand finally. ‘A behavioural virus?’
‘Well it would explain the war,’ said Vongsavath brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.
The tension shattered.
Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.
Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage – a faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armoury stock.
Fuck.
A third of the anti-radiation chemicals. Lost.
Back-up software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.
One functional buoy left.
Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.
Corrosion within.
‘So what are you going to tell the rest?’ Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.
I traded glances with Hand.
‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Not a fucking thing. We keep this between the three of us. Write it off to an accident.’
‘Accident?’ Vongsavath looked startled.
‘He’s right, Ameli.’ I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. ‘There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was powerpack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.’
Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.
Corrosion within.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.
‘Are those webs?’ someone asked.
Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.
‘That is fast work,’ said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. ‘But to me it looks defensive.’