‘Better,’ muttered the Wedge commander.
He made the second incision at the base of the skull, a lot more elegantly than I had back in the Landfall promoter’s office, and dug out the section of severed spine. Then he powered off the knife, wiped it carefully on Hand’s clothing and got up. He handed knife and spinal segment to Loemanako with a nod.
‘Thank you, sergeant. Get that to Hammad, tell him not to lose it. We just earnt ourselves a bonus.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Loemanako looked at the faces around us. ‘And, uh…?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Carrera raised one hand. His face seemed suddenly tired. ‘That.’
His hand fell like something discarded.
From the loading deck above I heard the discharge, a muffled crump followed by a chitinous rustling. I looked up and saw what looked like a swarm of crippled nanocopters tumbling down through the air.
I made the intuitive leap to what was going to happen with a curious detachment, a lack of combat reflex that must have had its roots in the mingled radiation sickness and tetrameth comedown. I just had time to look at Sutjiadi. He caught my eye and his mouth twitched. He knew as well as I did. As well as if there’d been a scarlet decal pulsing across the screen of our vision.
Game—
Then it was raining spiders.
Not really, but it looked that way. They’d fired the crowd control mortar almost straight up, a low-power crimped load for limited dispersal. The grey fist-sized inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty metres. The ones at the nearest edge glanced off the curving side of the battlewagon’s hull before they hit the sand, skidding and flailing for purchase with a minute intensity that I later recalled almost with amusement. The others bedded directly in puffs of turquoise sand and scuttled up out of the tiny craters they’d made like the tiny jewelled crabs in Tanya Wardani’s tropical paradise virtuality.
They fell in thousands.
Game—
They dropped on our heads and shoulders, soft as children’s cradle toys, and clung.
They scuttled towards us across the sand and scrambled up our legs.
They endured batting and shaking and clambered on undeterred.
The ones Sutjiadi and the others tore loose and flung away landed in a whirl of limbs and scuttled back unharmed.
They crouched knowledgeably above nerve points and plunged filament-thin tendril fangs through clothing and skin.
Game—
They bit in.
—Over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
There was no less reason for adrenalin to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shrivelled my sleeve’s capacity to deliver combat chemicals. The inhibitors reacted accordingly. I felt the nerve snap go through me, but it was a mild numbness, a fizzing that only dropped me to one knee.
The Maori sleeves were readier for a fight and so they took it harder. Deprez and Sutjiadi staggered and crashed into the sand as if shot with stunners. Vongsavath managed to control her fall, and rolled to the ground on her side, eyes wide.
Tanya Wardani just stood there looking dazed.
‘Thank you gentlemen.’ It was Carrera, calling up to the noncoms manning the mortar. ‘Exemplary grouping.’
Neural inhib remotes. State-of-the-art public order tech. Only cleared colonial embargo a couple of years ago. In my capacity as a local military adviser, I’d had the shiny new system demonstrated to me on crowds in Indigo City. I’d just never been on the receiving end before now.
Chill, an enthusiastic young public order corporal had told me with a grin. That’s all you need to do. ’Course, that’s extra funny in a riot situation. This shit lands on you, you’re just going to get more ’dreened up, means they just go on biting you, maybe even stop your heart in the end. Have to be fucking Zen-rigged to break the spiral, and you know what, we’re short on Zen riot activists this season.
I held the Envoy calm like a crystal, wiped my mind of consequence and got up. The spiders clung and flexed a little as I moved, but they didn’t bite again.
‘Shit, lieutenant, you’re coated. They must like you.’
Loemanako stood grinning at me from within a circle of clear sand, while surplus inhibitor units crawled around on the outer edge of the field his clean tag must be throwing down. A little to his right, Carrera moved in a similar pool of immunity. I glanced around and saw the other Wedge officers, untouched and watching.
Neat. Very fucking neat.
Behind them, political officer Lamont capered and pointed at us, jabbering.
Oh well. Who could blame him?
‘Yes, I think we’d better get you brushed off,’ said Carrera. ‘I’m sorry for the shock, Lieutenant Kovacs, but there was no other comfortable way to detain this criminal.’
He was pointing at Sutjiadi.
Actually, Carrera, you could have just sedated everybody in the ward ’fab. But that wouldn’t have been dramatic enough, and where transgressors against the Wedge are concerned, the men do like their stylised drama, don’t they?
I felt a brief chill run along my spine, chasing the thought.
And tamped it down quick, before it could become the fear or anger that would wake up the coat of spiders I wore.
I went for weary-laconic.
‘What the fuck are you talking about, Isaac?’
‘This man,’ Carrera’s voice was pitched to carry. ‘May have misrepresented himself to you as Jiang Jianping. His real name is Markus Sutjiadi, and he is wanted for crimes against Wedge personnel.’
‘Yeah.’ Loemanako lost his grin. ‘Fucker wasted Lieutenant Veutin, and his platoon sergeant.’
‘Veutin?’ I looked back at Carrera. ‘Thought he was down around Bootkinaree.’
‘Yes, he was.’ The Wedge commander was staring down at Sutjiadi’s crumpled form. For a moment I thought he was going to shoot him there and then with the blaster. ‘Until this piece of shit cut insubordinate and finished up feeding Veutin his own Sunjet. Killed Veutin really dead. Stack gone. Sergeant Bradwell went the same way when she tried to stop it. And two more of my men got their sleeves carved apart before someone locked this motherfucker down.’
‘No one gets away with that,’ said Loemanako sombrely. ‘Right, lieutenant? No local yokel takes down Wedge personnel and walks away from it. Shithead’s for the anatomiser.’
‘Is this true?’ I asked Carrera, for appearances’ sake.
He met my gaze and nodded. ‘Eye-witnesses. It’s open and shut.’
Sutjiadi stirred at his feet like something stamped on.
They cleaned the spiders off me with a deactivator broom, and then dumped them into a storage canister. Carrera handed me a tag and the approaching tide of unoccupied inhibitors fell back as I snapped it on.
‘About that debriefing,’ he said, and gestured me aboard the ’Chandra.
Behind me, my colleagues were led back to the bubblefab, stumbling as feeble adrenalin jags of resistance set off new ripples of bites from their new neural jailers. In the post-performance space we’d all left, the noncoms who’d fired the mortar went around with untamped canisters, gathering up the still crawling units that hadn’t managed to find a home.
Sutjiadi caught my eye again as he was leaving. Imperceptibly, he shook his head.
He needn’t have worried. I was barely up to climbing the entry ramp into the battlewagon’s belly, let alone taking on Carrera in empty-handed combat. I clung to the remaining fragments of the tetrameth lift and followed the Wedge commander along tight, equipment-racked corridors, up a hand-rung-lined gravchute and into the confines of what appeared to be his personal quarters.