This ought to mean something to you, Tak.
Like some kind of code, webbed into the way the glow shattered across the rim of my vision, something designed in the way it levered itself up and then sank down again by fractions.
Like glyphs. Like numerals.
And then it did mean something to me, and I felt a cold wave of sweat break across my entire body as I realised where I was.
The red glow was a head-up display, printing out across the bowl of the spacesuit faceplate I was lying trapped beneath.
This is no fucking night sky, Tak.
I was outside.
And then the weight of recall, of personality and past came crashing in on me, like a micrometeorite punching through the thin seal of transparency that was keeping my life in.
I flailed my arms and found I couldn’t move from the wrists up. My fingers groped around a rigid framework under my back, the faint thrum of a motor system. I reached around, twisting my head.
‘Hey, he’s coming out of it.’
It was a familiar voice, even through the thin metallic straining of the suit’s comsystem. Someone else chuckled tinnily.
‘Are you fucking surprised, man?’
Proximity sense gave me movement at my right side. Above me, I saw another helmet lean in, faceplate darkened to an impenetrable black.
‘Hey, lieutenant.’ Another voice I knew. ‘You just won me fifty bucks UN. I told these fucking suitfarts you’d pull through faster than anyone else.’
‘Tony?’ I managed faintly.
‘Hey, no cerebral damage either. Key another one in for 391 platoon, guys. We are fucking immortal.’
They brought us back from the Martian dreadnought like a vacuum commando funeral procession. Seven bodies on powered stretchers, four assault bugs and a twenty-five strong honour guard in full hard space combat rig. Carrera had been taking no chances when he finally deployed to the other side of the gate.
Tony Loemanako took us back through in immaculate style, as if Martian gate-beachheads were something he’d been doing all his professional life. He sent two bugs through first, followed with the stretchers and infantry, commandos peeling off in matched pairs on left and right, and closed it out with the last two bugs retreating through backwards. Suit, stretcher and bug drives all powered up to full grav-lift hover the second they hit Sanction IV ’s gravity field and when they grounded a couple of seconds after that, it was unified, on a single raise-and-clench command from Loemanako’s suited fist.
Carrera’s Wedge.
Propped up on the stretcher to the extent that the webbing allowed, I watched the whole thing and tried to damp down the sense of pride and belonging the wolf gene splice wanted me to feel.
‘Welcome to base camp, lieutenant,’ said Loemanako, dropping his fist to knock gently on my suit’s breastplate. ‘You’re going to be fine now. Everything’s going to be fine.’
His voice lifted in the comsystem. ‘Alright, people, let’s move. Mitchell and Kwok, stay suited and keep two of the bugs at standby. The rest of you, hit the shower – we’re done swimming for now. Tan, Sabyrov and Munharto, I want you back here in fifteen, wear what you like but tooled up to keep Kwok and Mitchell company. Everyone else, stand down. Chandra control, could we get some medical attention down here today, please.’
Laughter, rattling through the comset. There was a general loosening of stance around me, visible even through the bulk of vacuum combat gear and the non-reflective black polalloy suits beneath. Weapons went away, folded down, disconnected or simply sheathed. The bug riders climbed off their mounts with the precision of mechanical dolls and followed the general flow of suited bodies away down the beach. Waiting for them at water’s edge, the Wedge battlewagon Angin Chandra’s Virtue bulked on assault landing claws like some prehistoric cross between crocodile and turtle. Her heavily armoured chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.
It was good to see her again.
The beach, now I came to look at it, was a mess. In every direction as far as my limited vision could make out, the sand was torn up and furrowed around the shallow crater of fused glass the Nagini had made when she blew. The blast had taken the bubblefabs with it, leaving nothing but scorchmarks and a sparse few fragments of metal that professional pride told me could not possibly be part of the assault ship itself. The Nagini had airburst, and the explosion would have consumed every molecule of her structure instantaneously. If the ground was for dead people, Schneider had certainly won clear of the crowd. Most of him was probably still up in the stratosphere, dissipating.
What you’re good at, Tak.
The blast seemed to have sunk the trawler too. Twisting my head, I could just make out the stern and heat-mangled superstructure jutting above the water. Memory flickered brightly through my head – Luc Deprez and a bottle of cheap whisky, junk politics and government-banned cigars, Cruickshank leaning over me in—
Don’t do this, Tak.
The Wedge had put up a few items of their own to replace the vaporised camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few metres off the crater on the left, and down by the snout of the battlewagon, I picked out the sealed square cabin and the bulk pressure tanks of the polalloy shower unit. The returning vacuum commandos shucked their heavier items of weaponry on adjacent tent-canopied racks and filed in through the rinse hatch.
From the ’Chandra came a file of Wedge uniforms with the white shoulder flash of the medical unit. They gathered around the stretchers, powered them up and shunted us off towards one of the bubblefabs. Loemanako touched me on the arm as my stretcher lifted.
‘See you later, lieutenant. I’ll drop by once they got you shelled. Got to go and rinse now.’
‘Yeah, thanks Tony.’
‘Good to see you again, sir.’
In the bubblefab, the medics got us unstrapped and then unsuited, working with brisk, clinical efficiency. By virtue of being conscious, I was a little easier to unpack than the others, but there wasn’t much in it. I’d been without the anti-rad dosing for too long and just bending or lifting each limb took major efforts of will. When they finally got me out of the suit and onto a bed, it was as much as I could do to answer the questions the medic put to me as he ran a series of standard post-combat checks on my sleeve. I managed to keep my eyes jacked half open while he did it, and watched past his shoulder as they ran the same tests on the others. Sun, who was pretty obviously beyond immediate repair, they dumped unceremoniously in a corner.
‘So will I live, doc?’ I mumbled at one point.
‘Not in this sleeve.’ Prepping an anti-rad cocktail hypospray as he talked. ‘But I can keep you going for a while longer, I think. Save you having to talk to the old man in virtual.’
‘What does he want, a debriefing?’
‘I guess.’
‘Well you’d better jack me up with something so I don’t fall asleep on him. Got any ’meth?’
‘I’m not convinced that’s a good idea right now, lieutenant.’
That merited a laugh, dredged up dry from somewhere. ‘Yeah, you’re right. That stuff’ll ruin my health.’
In the end I had to pull rank on him to get the tetrameth, but he jacked me. I was more or less functional when Carrera walked in.
‘Lieutenant Kovacs.’
‘Isaac.’
The grin broke across his scarred face like sunrise on crags. He shook his head. ‘You motherfucker, Kovacs. Do you know how many men I’ve had deployed across this hemisphere looking for you?’