Against my chest, my discarded induction mike burred. I blinked down at it for a moment, then picked it up and fitted it.
‘…just ly—…—ere,’ said Vongsavath’s voice, excited and laced heavily with static breakup. ‘What-ver… was… don’t thin—… died of starv…’
‘Vongsavath, this is Kovacs. Back up a minute. Slow down and start again.’
‘I said,’ the pilot enunciated with heavy emphasis. ‘Th—… ’ve found… ther body. A hu… body. Part… gang…—cked up at the dock…—ation. An—… looks li—… thing kill—… him.’
‘Alright, we’re on our way.’ I struggled to my feet, forcing myself to speak at a pace Vongsavath might have a chance of understanding through the interference. ‘Repeat. We are on our way. Stay put, back to back and don’t move. And shoot any fucking thing you see.’
‘What is it?’ asked Wardani.
‘Trouble.’
I looked around the platform and suddenly Sutjiadi’s words came rolling back over me.
We shouldn’t be out here at all.
Over my head, the Martian gazed blankly down at us. As far removed as any angel, and as much help.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
He was lying in one of the bulbous tunnels, about a kilometre deeper into the body of the vessel, suited up and still largely intact. In the soft blue light from the walls, the features behind the faceplate were clearly shrunken onto the bones of the skull, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have decomposed appreciably.
I knelt beside the corpse and peered at the sealed-in face.
‘Doesn’t look too bad, considering.’
‘Sterile air supply,’ said Deprez. He had his Sunjet cocked on his hip, and his eyes flickered constantly into the swollen roof-space overhead. Ten metres further on and looking slightly less comfortable with her weapon, Ameli Vongsavath prowled back and forth by the opening where the tunnel linked to the next bubble chamber. ‘And anti-bacterials, if it’s a halfway decent suit. Interesting. The tank’s still a third full. Whatever he died of, it wasn’t suffocation.’
‘Any damage to the suit?’
‘If there is, I cannot find it.’
I sat back on my heels. ‘Doesn’t make any sense. This air’s breathable. Why suit up?’
Deprez shrugged. ‘Why die in your suit on the outside of an open atmosphere lock? None of it makes any sense. I’m not trying any more.’
‘Movement,’ snapped Vongsavath.
I cleared the right-hand interface gun and joined her at the opening. The lower lip rose a little over a metre from the floor and curved upward like a wide smile before narrowing gradually up towards the roof on either side and finally closing in a tightly rounded apex. There were two metres of clear cover on each side and space to crouch below the lip. It was a sniper’s dream.
Deprez folded into the cover on the left, Sunjet stowed upright at his side. I crouched beside Vongsavath.
‘Sounded like something falling,’ murmured the pilot. ‘Not this chamber, maybe the next.’
‘Alright.’ I felt the neurachem sliding coldly along my limbs, charging my heart. Good to know that, under the bone-deep weariness of the radiation poisoning, the systems were still online. And after grasping so long at shadows, fighting faceless nanobe colonies, the ghosts of the departed, human and not, the promise of solid combat was almost a pleasure.
Scratch almost. I could feel pleasure tickling up the walls of my stomach at the thought of killing something.
Deprez raised one hand from the projection ramp of his Sunjet.
Listen.
This time I heard it – a stealthy scuffing sound across the chamber. I drew the other interface gun and settled into the cover of the raised lip. The Envoy conditioning squeezed the last of the tension out of my muscles and stowed it in coiled reflexes beneath a surface calm.
Something pale moved in a space on the other side of the next chamber. I breathed in and sighted on it.
Here we go.
‘You there, Ameli?’
Schneider’s voice.
I heard Vongsavath’s breath hiss out about the same time as mine. She climbed to her feet.
‘Schneider? What are you doing? I nearly shot you.’
‘Well, that’s fucking friendly.’ Schneider appeared clearly in the opening and swung his leg over. His Sunjet was slung carelessly across one shoulder. ‘We come rushing to the rescue, and you blow us away for our trouble.’
‘Is it another archaeologue?’ asked Hand, following Schneider through into the chamber. Incongruous in his right fist was a hand blaster. It was the first time, I realised, that I’d seen the executive armed since I’d known him. It didn’t look right on him. It marred his ninetieth-floor boardroom aura. It was inappropriate, a cracked front, jarring the way genuine battle coverage would in a Lapinee recruiting number. Hand was not a man who wielded weapons himself. Or at least not weapons as straightforward and grubby as a particle blaster.
Plus he’s got a stunner tucked away in his pocket.
Recently powered up to combat readiness, the Envoy conditioning twinged uneasily.
‘Come and have a look,’ I suggested, masking my disquiet.
The two new arrivals crossed the open ground to us with a blasé lack of caution that screamed at my combat nerves. Hand leaned his hands on the lip of the tunnel entrance and stared at the corpse. His features, I suddenly saw, were ashen with the radiation sickness. His stance looked braced, as if he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand up. There was a tic at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been there when we touched down in the docking bay. Next to him, Schneider looked positively glowing with health.
I crushed out the flicker of sympathy. Welcome to the fucking club, Hand. Welcome to ground level on Sanction IV.
‘He’s suited up,’ Hand said.
‘Well spotted.’
‘How did he die?’
‘We don’t know.’ I felt another wave of weariness wash through me. ‘And to be honest I’m not in the mood for an autopsy. Let’s just get this buoy fixed, and get the fuck out of here.’
Hand gave me a strange look. ‘We’ll need to take him back.’
‘Well, you can help me do it, then.’ I walked back to the suited corpse and picked up one leg. ‘Grab a foot.’
‘You’re going to drag him?’
‘We, Hand. We are going to drag him. I don’t think he’ll mind.’
It took the best part of an hour to get the corpse back through the tortuous pipes and swooping chambers of the Martian vessel and aboard the Nagini. Most of that was taken up trying to locate the limpet cherries and illuminum arrows of our original mapping, but the radiation sickness took its toll along the way. At different points in the journey, Hand and I were taken with minor bouts of vomiting and had to give hauling the body over to Schneider and Deprez. Time emptying out for the final victims of Sauberville. I thought even Deprez, in his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, was starting to look ill as we fumbled the bulky suited burden through the last opening before the docking station. Now that I focused in the bluish light, Vongsavath too was starting to exhibit the same grey pallor and bruised eyes.
Do you see? whispered something that might have been Semetaire.
There seemed to be a huge, sickly sense of something waiting in the swollen heights of the ship’s architecture, hovering on parchment-thin wings, and watching.
When we were done, I stood staring into the antiseptic violet glow of the corpse locker after the others had left. The tumbled, spacesuited figures within looked like a gaggle of overly padded null G crashball players, collapsed on top of each other when the field goes down and the house lights come up at the end of the match. The pouches containing the remains of Cruickshank, Hansen and Dhasanapongsakul were almost hidden from view.