I gestured. ‘Well, women—’
‘Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m straight.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’ She let the cord fall and shook her head so the rest of the silvered mane rearranged itself as it had been. ‘Oh.’
A century ago they were harder to spot. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal. Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different to the next human sleeve – a bit sick around the gills maybe when they’d been in the field for too long, but that’s the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say.
The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that. For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians’ interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot. They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than-light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporisation of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels’ motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.
Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan’s World’s very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you’d call smart. Now here were the archaeologue systems specialists suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half million years old.
Some form of upgrade was in order. Definitely.
Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whisky glass.
‘Why’d you sign up?’ I asked her, to fill the quiet.
She shrugged. ‘Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.’
‘And it isn’t?’
A wry grin. ‘No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.’
‘The Initiative can’t last forever.’
‘No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.’
‘Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.’
‘Well, spot the fucking offworlder.’ She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. ‘Might not be big by your standards – I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Round here it’s a little different.’
I smiled. ‘I’m from here, Sylvie.’
‘Oh, yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.’
In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.
You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.
Well, wouldn’t you?
‘I’m going to bed,’ slurred Sylvie. ‘Busy day tomorrow.’
I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.
‘Sylvie, it is tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’ She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated. ‘’loader doesn’t lift ’til lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.’
‘Thanks.’
She gave me a faded smile. ‘Hey, Micky. Least I can do. G’night.’
‘’night.’
I watched her wander to her room, checked my time chip and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.
That was the last conscious thought I had.
Fucking synth sleeves.
CHAPTER FOUR
The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering. Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.
Shit.
Bang bang.
I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.
Bang, bang, bang.
‘Fuck is that?’ yelled someone from an inner room.
Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.
‘Door,’ I said, feeling foolish.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she grumbled. ‘I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.’
The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.
‘Will someone fucking answer that!’ It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.
‘Got it,’ Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. ‘Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.’
She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.
‘You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?’ she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. ‘We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!!!’
There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad. He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.