‘Trust me.’ Just the words brought a grin to my lips. ‘State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission’s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition.’
Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. ‘Alright. Enough. We’ve got an agreement. Don’t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling.’
‘You’d just better not be fucking with me,’ I said amiably.
‘I’m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy,’ he sniffed. ‘In Landfall, at any rate.’
‘And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek.’
‘That’s a strange attitude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world.’
‘Figure of speech. A good technician. Don’t go cutting corners on me.’
‘Well, if you don’t trust me,’ he said huffily, ‘why don’t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you?’
‘She’ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a fuck-up.’
‘I’m sure she does. She seems very competent.’
I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every manoeuvre and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse, and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.
‘Yes. She is.’
‘You know,’ Roespinoedji chuckled. ‘Last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked.’
I shivered again. ‘Yeah. Wasn’t easy.’
We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji’s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like woodsmoke from someone else’s beach barbecue.
‘Did you give it a name?’ Roespinoedji wondered finally. ‘This starship.’
‘No, there wasn’t really that kind of time.’
‘So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?’
I shrugged.
‘The Wardani?’
‘Ah.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘And would she like that?’
I picked up my glass and drained it.
‘How the fuck would I know?’
She’d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knock-off, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji’s place, she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out.
I didn’t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it any more and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.
Roespinoedji was sold.
The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji’s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instil fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.
‘It’s cool,’ she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. ‘Why don’t you go talk to Tanya? I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.’
‘To me?’
The pilot shrugged impatiently. ‘To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.’
‘Is she still in her room?’
‘She went out.’ Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that constituted Dig 27’s town centre. ‘Go. I’ll watch these guys.’
I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the facade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.
She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn’t let go of.
‘You following me?’
‘Not intentionally,’ I lied. ‘Sleep well?’
She shook her head. ‘I can still hear Sutjiadi.’
‘Yeah.’
When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. ‘You going in here?’
‘Are you fucking—? No. I only stopped to…’ and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.
I peered at the glyphs. ‘Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?’
She almost smiled.
‘No.’ She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. ‘It’s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It’s sort of a grafitti as well. It says.’ She stopped, shook her head again. ‘There’s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good shit before you go up in a populated area.’
‘You’re winding me up. It doesn’t say that.’
‘It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too.’ She turned away. ‘They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell.’
The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.
‘I was going to the dighead,’ she said. ‘That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—’
‘Sure. I’ll walk with you.’
She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.
‘Maybe I should get one of those.’
‘Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.’
We plodded up the slope.
‘You sure this is going to come off?’ she asked.
‘What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?’
‘I think he’s a fucking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.’