‘I don’t know, Isaac. I had suits stashed. Maybe swim out and hang around at the edge of the gate broadcasting a mayday squawk across to you guys.’
‘And if the gate wasn’t radio-transparent?’
‘It’s starlight-transparent. And scanner-transparent, apparently.’
‘That doesn’t mean a coherent—’
‘Then I’d have tossed through a fucking remote beacon and hoped it survived the nanobes long enough for you to get a fix. Jesus, Isaac. I’m an Envoy. We make this stuff up on the fly. Worse-case scenario, we had a close-to-working claim buoy. Sun could have fixed it, set it to transmit and then we could all have blasted our brains out and waited until someone came out to take a look. Wouldn’t have mattered much – none of us have got more than a week left in these sleeves anyway. And whoever came out to check the claim signal would have had to re-sleeve us – we’d be the resident experts, even if we were dead.’
He smiled at that. We both did.
‘Still not what I’d call leaktight strategic planning, Takeshi.’
‘Isaac, you just don’t get it.’ A little seriousness dripped back into my voice, erasing my smile. ‘I’m an Envoy. The strategic plan was to kill anyone who tried to backstab me. Surviving afterwards, well that’s a bonus if you can do it, but if you can’t.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m an Envoy.’
His own smile slipped slightly.
‘Get some rest, Takeshi,’ he said gently.
I watched him walk out, then settled to watching Sutjiadi’s motionless form. Hoping the tetrameth would keep me up until he came round and found out what he had to do to avoid formal execution at the hands of a Wedge punishment squad.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Tetrameth is one of my favourite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like no, you can’t fly without a grav harness or punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side-effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.
The comedown is no worse than most poisons.
I was starting to feel slightly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail-end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi over-vigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.
‘Jiang, hey Jiang. Open your fucking eyes. Guess where we are.’
He blinked up at me, face curiously child-like.
‘Whuhh—’
‘Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.’ The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades-in-arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. ‘Fucking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.’
‘The Wedge? That’s.’ Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. ‘Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.’
I sat back again, on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.
‘They came looking for me.’ For all the pretence, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. ‘You believe that?’
‘If you say so.’ Sutjiadi propped himself up. ‘Who else made it out?’
‘All of us except Sun.’ I gestured. ‘And she’s retrievable.’
His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. ‘Back there. Did you. See?’
‘Yeah, I saw.’
‘They were ghosts,’ he said, biting down on the words.
‘Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.’
‘That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.’ Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. ‘Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?’
I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. ‘What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.’
She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.
‘Good for you.’ Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. ‘So who do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?’
‘Take your pick.’
After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity – a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breathe this stuff for a living.
Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage between us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.
‘At least,’ I said at one point, ‘we know why they left the fucking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near-miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.’
‘I,’ said Deprez emphatically, ‘Do not. Believe. In ghosts.’
‘That didn’t seem to bother them.’
‘Do you think,’ Vongsavath, picking her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide, ‘all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?’
Wardani shook her head. ‘If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.’
‘I felt,’ Sutjiadi swallowed. ‘They were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilisation far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, any more. Maybe they evolved past that.’
I grunted. ‘Neat trick, if you can manage it.’
‘And we apparently can’t,’ said Wardani.
‘Maybe we would have, if that kind of thing was left floating around every time we committed mass murder.’
‘Kovacs, that’s absurd.’ Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. ‘All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction IV? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.’