A slight hesitation. ‘Your team?’
I grimaced. ‘Jiang Jianping got turned into soup by an ultravibe blast, the nanobes took Hansen and Cruicksha—’
‘Your tea—’
‘I heard what you fucking said the first time, Isaac.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. I merely wonder—’
‘Training’s got fucking nothing to do with it, and you know it. You can go sell that fucking song to Lapinee. Machines and luck, that’s what kills you or keeps you alive on Sanction IV.’
Scan, search, find that motherfucker.
And calm down.
‘Sanction IV and any other conflict,’ Carrera said quietly. ‘You of all people should know that. It’s the nature of the game. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have dealt yourself in. The Wedge isn’t a conscript army.’
‘Isaac, the whole fucking planet has been conscripted into this war. No one’s got any choice any more. You’re going to be involved, you might as well have the big guns. That’s a Quellism for you, in case you wondered.’
He grunted. ‘Sounds like common sense to me. Didn’t that bitch ever say anything original?’
There. My ’methed-out nerves jumped with it. Right there.
The slim edge of something built by human technology, stark angular outline caught by flarelight among the curves at the base of a bubble outcrop. One side of an impeller set frame. I settled the Sunjet into place and lined up on the target. Drawled response.
‘She wasn’t a philosopher, Isaac. She was a soldier.’
‘She was a terrorist.’
‘We quibble over terms.’
I triggered the Sunjet. Fire lanced across the concave arena and splashed off the outline. Something exploded visibly off the hull, in fragments. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.
Breathing.
It was the only thing that warned me. The papery whisper of breath at the bottom of the suit receiver. The suppressed sound of effort.
Fu—
Something invisible shattered and shed light over my head. Something no more visible spanged off my faceplate, leaving a tiny glowing V of chipped glass. I felt other tiny impacts off my suit.
Grenade!
Instinct had me already spinning to the right. Later, I realised why. It was the quickest route between Carrera’s position and mine, working round the rim of hull architecture that ringed the docking bay. A single third of the circle, and Carrera had crept round it while he talked to me. Shed of the impellers that had decoyed me and would in any case telltale his movement, he’d dragged and shoved himself from handhold to boot purchase point, all the way round. He’d used anger to disguise the stress in his voice as he worked, held down his breathing elsewhere, and at some point he judged close enough, he’d lain still and waited for me to give myself away with the Sunjet. And with the experience of decades in vacuum combat, he’d hit me with the one weapon that wouldn’t show up.
Exemplary, really.
He came at me across fifty metres of space like a flying version of Semetaire on the beach, arms reaching. The Sunjet sprouted recognisably from his right fist, a Philips squeeze launcher from his left. Though there was no way to detect it, I knew the second electromag-accelerated grenade was already in flight between us.
I jammed the impellers to life and backflipped. The hull vanished from view, then hinged back in from the top as I spiralled away. The grenade, deflected by the wash from the impeller drives as I flipped, exploded and sewed space with shrapnel. I felt shards of the stuff bang through one leg and foot, sudden numbing impacts and then traceries of pain through the flesh like biofilaments slicing. My ears popped painfully as suit pressure dropped. The polalloy socked inward at a dozen other points, but it held.
I tumbled up and over the bubble outcrop, a sprawling target in the flarelight, hull and bearings spinning around me. The pain in my ears eased as the polalloy congealed across the damage. No time to look for Carrera. I trimmed the impeller thrust, then dived once more for the globular landscape stretching below me. Sunjet fire flashed around me.
I hit the hull a glancing blow, used the impact to change trajectories and saw another Sunjet blast scythe past on the left. I caught a glimpse of Carrera as he adhered briefly to a rounded surface back up the slope of the dimple. I already knew the next move. From there, he’d push off with a single well-controlled kick and ride the simple linear velocity down towards me, firing as he came. At some point he’d get close enough to punch molten holes through the suit that the polalloy could not congeal over.
I bounced off another bubble. More idiot tumbling. More near-miss Sunjet fire. I trimmed the impellers again, tried for a line that would take me into the shadow of the outcrop, and cut off the thrust. My hands groped after something to hold and caught on one of the bas relief scroll effects I’d spotted earlier. I killed my motion and twisted round to look for Carrera.
No sign. I was out of line of sight.
I turned back and crept gratefully further around the bubble outcrop. Another curl of bas relief offered itself and I reached down—
Oh, shit.
I was holding the wing of a Martian.
Shock held me unstirring for a second. Time enough for me to think this was some kind of carving in the hull surface, time enough to know at some deep level that it wasn’t.
The Martian had died screaming. The wings were flung back, sunk into the hull surface for most of their width, protruding only at the curled extremities and where their muscled webbing rose up under the arched spine of the creature. The head was twisted in agony, beak gaping open, eyes glaring like comet-tailed orbs of washed jet. One clawed limb lifted talons above the hull surface. The whole corpse was sheathed in the material of the hull it had flailed against, drowning there.
I shifted my gaze and looked out across the surface ahead of me, the scattered scrawl of raised detail, and knew finally what I was looking at. The hull around the docking-bay dimple – all of it, the whole bubbling expanse – was a mass grave, a spider’s web trap for thousands upon thousands of Martians who had all died entombed in whatever substances had run and foamed and burst here when –
When what?
The shape of the catastrophe was outside anything I could envisage. I could not imagine the weapons that would do this, the circumstances of this conflict between two civilisations as far ahead of humanity’s scavenger-built little empire as we were from the gulls whose bodies had clogged the water around Sauberville. I could not see how it could happen. I could only see the results. I could only see the dead.
Nothing ever changes. A hundred and fifty light years from home and the same shit just keeps going down.
Got to be some kind of universal fucking constant.
The grenade bounced off another hull-drowned Martian ten metres away, careened up and exploded. I rolled away from the blast. A brief pummelling over my back and one searing penetration under my shoulder. Pressure drop like a knife through my eardrums. I screamed.
Fuck this.
I fired the impellers and burst out of the cover of the bubble outcrop, not knowing what I was going to do until I did it. Carrera’s gliding figure showed up less than fifty metres off. I saw Sunjet fire, turned on my back and dived directly at the docking-bay mouth. Carrera’s voice trailed me, almost amused.
‘Where do you think you’re going, Kovacs?’