‘When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,’ Hand said, ‘you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That’s what I’m buying from you now.’
Jiang looked at him with open disdain. ‘I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.’
‘Oh, Damballah.’ Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. ‘What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think paid for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for me. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.’
‘Hand.’ I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the centre of the cabin. ‘I think your sales technique’s flagging. Why don’t you give it a rest?’
‘Kovacs, I am not—’
‘Sit down.’ The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.
Faces turned expectantly in my direction.
Not this again.
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘We can’t. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can’t. Not until we’ve placed the buoy.’
I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.
I turned to Hand.
‘Why don’t you tell them who deployed the OPERN system? Tell them why.’
He just looked at me.
‘Alright. I’ll tell them.’ I looked round at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. ‘Our sponsor here has a few home-grown enemies back in Landfall who’d quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn’t. So far that hasn’t worked, but back in Landfall they don’t know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we’ll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?’
Hand nodded.
‘And the Wedge code?’ asked Sutjiadi. ‘That counts for nothing?’
More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.
‘What Wedge co—’
‘Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—’
‘How come we didn’t—’
‘Shut up, all of you.’ To my amazement, they did. ‘Wedge command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren’t made aware of it because,’ I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab, ‘you didn’t need to know. You didn’t matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?’
He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.
‘Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,’ he said with the measure of a lecturer. ‘Whoever deployed the OPERN system nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same channels will provide them with the authorisation codes Isaac Carrera operates under. The Wedge are the most likely candidates to shoot us down.’
Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. ‘You’re Wedge, Kovacs. I don’t believe they will murder one of their own. They’re not known for it.’
I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.
‘Unfortunately,’ I said. ‘Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand’s enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It’ll short-circuit any influence I have.’
‘You could not bluff? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.’
I nodded. ‘I might try that. But the odds aren’t good, and there is an easier way.’
That cut across the low babble of dispute.
Deprez inclined his head. ‘And that is?’
‘The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we’re home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we’ve found, Hand’s pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we’re dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.’
It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all fucking looking at me.
Please, not this again.
‘The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.’
The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They’d come round. They’d come round because they’d see what Hand and I already knew. They’d see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn’t see it that way—
I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.
Anyone who didn’t see it that way, I’d shoot.
For someone whose speciality was machine systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the Nagini up to less than fifty metres off the cave entrance. With the forward re-entry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.
It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun’s cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.
It was a sound like the world splintering apart.
I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn’t space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn’t feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disconnected at the images, rock changing colour with shocking vividness as it crazed and shattered under pressures of plate-tectonic magnitude, then the rushing collapse of the shards as they hurried downward, turned to dense clouds of powder before they could escape the ultravibe beams probing back and forth in the debris. I could feel a vague discomfort in the pit of my stomach from the backwash. Sun was firing on low intensity and shielding in the weapons pod kept the worst of the ultravibe blast damped down aboard the Nagini. But still the shrill scream of the beam and the pittering screeches of the tortured rock clawed their way in through the two open hatches and screwed into my ears like surgery.
I kept seeing Cruickshank die.
Twenty-three minutes.
The ultravibe shut down.
The gate emerged from the devastation and billowing dust like a tree through a blizzard. Wardani had told me it wouldn’t be harmed by any weapon she knew of, but Sun had still programmed the Nagini’s weapon systems to cease fire as soon as they had visual. Now, as the dust clouds began to drift away, I saw the tangled remnants of the archaeologue’s equipment, torn and flung apart by the final seconds of the ultravibe blast. It was hard to believe the dense integrity of the artefact bulking above the debris.
A tiny feather of awe brushed down my spine, a sudden recollection of what I was looking at. Sutjiadi’s words came back to me.
We do not belong here. We are not ready.
I shrugged it off.