You will be
It flared through me like tears up behind my eyes. Like the wolf-weeping loss that Loemanako’s and Kwok’s deaths had brought up through my throat.
‘Good,’ he said simply. ‘But a little late.’
‘Have you seen what’s behind you, Isaac?’
‘Yeah. Impressive, but very dead. No ghosts that I’ve seen.’ He waited. ‘Do you have anything else to say?’
I shook my head. He raised the Sunjet.
‘This is for my murdered men,’ he said.
‘Look at the fucking thing,’ I screamed, every increment of Envoy intonation pushed into it and for just a fraction of a second his head shifted. I came up off the floor, flexing in the mob suit, hurling the interface gun into the space below his hinged-up faceplate and diving at him low.
Miserly shavings of luck, a tetrameth crash and my fading grip on Envoy combat poise. It was all I had left and I took it all across the space between us, teeth bared. When the Sunjet crackled, it hit where I’d been. Maybe it was the shouted distractor, shifting his focus, maybe the gun hurtling towards his face, maybe just this same tired general sense that it was all over.
He staggered backwards as I hit him, and I trapped the Sunjet between our bodies. He slid into a combat judo block that would have thrown an unarmoured man off his hip. I hung on with the stolen strength of Loemanako’s suit. Another two stumbling backsteps and we both smashed into the mummified Martian corpse together. The frame tipped and collapsed. We tumbled over it like clowns, staggering to get up as we slipped. The corpse disintegrated. Powder burst of pale orange in the air around us.
I’m sorry.
You will be, if the skin crumbles.
Faceplate up, panting, Carrera must have sucked in a lungful of the stuff. More settled on his eyes and the exposed skin of his face.
The first yell as he felt it eating in.
Then the screams.
He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then, the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.
He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.
I’m sorry.
I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.
‘That’s wonderful,’ he breathed. ‘The stuff of epics.’
‘Stop that,’ I told him.
‘No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.’
‘Well,’ I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. ‘You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the fucking thing.’
‘You may laugh.’ There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. ‘But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?’
I poured my glass half full of whisky again. ‘Kemp manages.’
‘Oh, that’s politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu—’ he snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?’
‘Communitarianism.’
‘Yes, that.’ He shook his head sagely. ‘That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savour? Where’s the blood and adrenalin?’
I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.
Pity they didn’t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.
I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.
‘Plenty of blood out there at the moment,’ I observed.
‘Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.’
‘Thought you would.’
‘In less than a year he’d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn’t, his own people would, uh, vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him.’
‘He doesn’t strike me as the sort to go quietly.’
‘Yes, that’s the problem with voting,’ said Roespinoedji judiciously. ‘Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?’
‘Kemp? Yeah, a few times.’
‘And what was he like?’
He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same goddamned fucking conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.
‘Tall,’ I said. ‘He was tall.’
‘Ah. Well, yes, he would be.’
I turned to look at the boy beside me. ‘Doesn’t it worry you, Djoko? What’s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?’
He grinned. ‘I doubt their political assessors are any different to the Cartel’s. Everyone has appetites. And besides. With what you’ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul.’ His look sharpened. ‘Allowing that we have dismantled all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is.’
‘Relax. I told you, I only ever set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it’d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for.’
‘Hmm.’ Roespinoedji rolled whisky around in the base of his glass. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. ‘Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?’
I shrugged. ‘What if? Hand could never risk assuming he’d found all of them, too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff.’
‘Yes. Well, you’re the Envoy.’ He prodded at the slim hand-sized slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. ‘And you’re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognise this broadcast?’