Outnumbered and outgunned and left for dead at Shalai, Carrera held position in the bombed-out streets and buildings for two hours, until the storm swept in and covered everything. Then he led a stalk-and-slaughter counteroffensive through the howling wind and street-level shreds of cloud until the airwaves crackled stiff with panicked airborne commanders ordering withdrawal. When the storm lifted, Shalai Gap was littered with the Kempist dead and the Wedge had taken less than two dozen casualties.
He leaned close again, no longer angry. His eyes searched my face.
‘Am I – finally – making myself clear, lieutenant? A sacrifice is required. We may not like it, you and I, but that is the price of Wedge membership.’
I nodded.
‘Then you are ready to move past this?’
‘I’m dying, Isaac. About all I’m ready for right now is some sleep.’
‘I understand. I won’t keep you much longer. Now.’ He gestured through the datacoil and it awoke in swirls. I sighed and groped after fresh focus. ‘The penetration squad took an extrapolated line back from the Nagini’s angle of re-entry and fetched up pretty damn close to the same docking bay you breached. Loemanako says there were no apparent shut-out controls. So how did you get in?’
‘Was already open.’ I couldn’t be bothered to construct lies, guessed in any case that he’d interrogate the others soon enough. ‘For all we know, there are no shut-out controls.’
‘On a warship?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘Isaac, the whole ship mounts a spatial shield that stands at least two kilometres out from the hull. What the fuck would they need with individual docking station shut out?’
‘You saw that?’
‘Yeah. Very much in action.’
‘Hmm.’ He made a couple of minor adjustments in the coil. ‘The sniffer units found human traces a good three or four kilometres into the interior. But they found you in an observation bubble not much more than a kilometre and a half from your entry point.’
‘Well, that couldn’t have been hard. We painted the way with big fucking illuminum arrows.’
He gave me a hard look. ‘Did you go walkabout in there?’
‘Not me, no.’ I shook my head, then regretted it as the little cabin pulsed unpleasantly in and out of focus around me. I waited it out. ‘Some of them did. I never found out how far they went.’
‘Doesn’t sound very organised.’
‘It wasn’t,’ I said irritably. ‘I don’t know, Isaac. Try and incubate a sense of wonder, huh? Might help when you get over there.’
‘So it, ah, appears.’ He hesitated, and it took me a moment to realise he was embarrassed. ‘You, ah, you saw. Ghosts. Over there?’
I shrugged, suppressing an urge to cackle uncontrollably. ‘We saw something. I’m still not sure what it was. Been listening in to your guests, Isaac?’
He smiled and made an apologetic gesture. ‘Lamont’s habits, rubbing off on me. And since he’s lost the taste for snooping, seems a shame to let the equipment go to waste.’ He prodded again at the datacoil. ‘The medical report says you all showed symptoms of a heavy stunblast, except you and Sun, obviously.’
‘Yeah, Sun shot herself. We…’ Abruptly, it seemed impossible to explain. Like trying to shoulder a massive weight unaided. The last moments in the Martian starship, wrapped in the brilliant pain and radiance of whatever her crew had left behind them. The certainty that this alien grief was going to crack us open. How did you convey that to the man who had led you behind raging gunfire to victory at Shalai Gap and a dozen other engagements? How did you get across the ice-aching diamond-bright reality of those moments?
Reality? The doubt jolted rudely.
Was it? Come to that, come to the gun barrel-and-grime reality that Isaac Carrera lived, was it real any more? Had it ever been? How much of what I remembered was hard fact?
No, look. I’ve got Envoy recall—
But had it been that bad? I looked into the datacoil, trying wearily to muster rational thought. Hand had called it, and I bought in with something not much short of panic. Hand, the hougan. Hand, the religious maniac. When else had I ever trusted him as far as I could throw him?
Why had I trusted him then?
Sun. I grabbed at the fact. Sun knew. She saw it coming and she blew her own brains out rather than face it.
Carrera was looking at me strangely.
‘Yes?’
You and Sun…
‘Wait a minute.’ It dawned on me. ‘You said except Sun and me?’
‘Yes. The others all show the standard electroneural trauma. Heavy blast, as I said.’
‘But not me.’
‘Well, no.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You weren’t touched. Why, do you remember someone shooting you?’
When we were done, he flattened the datacoil display with one callused hand and walked me back through the empty corridors of the battlewagon and then across the night-time murmur of the camp. We didn’t talk much. He’d backed up in the face of my confusion, and let the debriefing slide. Probably he couldn’t believe he was seeing one of his pet Envoys in this state.
I was having a hard time believing it myself.
She shot you. You dropped the stunner and she shot you, then herself. She must have.
Otherwise…
I shivered.
On a clear patch of sand to the rear of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, they were erecting the scaffold for Sutjiadi’s execution. The primary support struts were already in place, sunk deep into the sand and poised to receive the tilted, runnelled butcher’s platform. Under the illumination from three Angier lamps and the environ floods from the battlewagon’s rear drop hatch, the structure was a claw of bleached bone rising from the beach. The disassembled segments of the anatomiser lay close by, like sections of a wasp someone had chopped to death.
‘The war’s shifting,’ said Carrera conversationally. ‘Kemp’s a spent force on this continent. We haven’t had an air strike in weeks. He’s using the iceberg fleet to evacuate his forces across the Wacharin straits.’
‘Can’t he hold the coast there?’ I asked the question on automatic, the ghost of attention from a hundred deployment briefings past.
Carrera shook his head. ‘Not a chance. That’s a flood plain a hundred klicks back south and east. Nowhere to dig in, and he doesn’t have the hardware to build wet bunkers. That means no long-term jamming, no net-supported weapon systems. Give me six more months and I’ll have amphibious armour harrying him off the whole coastal strip. Another year and we’ll be parking the ’Chandra over Indigo City.’
‘And then what?’
‘Sorry?’
‘And then what? When you’ve taken Indigo City, when Kemp’s bombed and mined and particle-blasted every worthwhile asset there is and escaped into the mountains with the real diehards, then what?’
‘Well.’ Carrera puffed out his cheeks. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. ‘The usual. Holding strategy across both continents, limited police actions and scapegoating until everyone calms down. But by that time…’