‘Oshima’s ill?’ he asked flatly.
‘Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands. ’ Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. ‘Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?’
‘The highlands.’ Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. ‘Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work clean-up.’
Lazlo shrugged. ‘Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have to—’
‘You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.’
‘We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.’ The lie came out, Envoy smooth. Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight – it had been a while since I’d done this. ‘Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.’
Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.
‘You are Serendipity?’
‘Yes.’
‘The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?’
Tag the pressure point, go after it. ‘I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.’
‘Yes. So I see.’ Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. ‘Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.’
This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. ‘Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.’
‘And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.’
‘Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.’
The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. ‘I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.’
‘But—’
‘We fell back to the north east,’ I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. ‘As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.’
‘We? You were involved in that decision?’
‘I was bleeding to death,’ I repeated.
Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. ‘You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.’
‘Yeah, that’s ’cause we brought the fucking house down on them,’ snapped Lazlo. ‘Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand to fucking hand in a tunnel on our way out.’
Again, Kurumaya favoured the wincefish with a cold stare.
‘There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower level structure. If there—’
‘If? Fucking if?’
‘—were mimints as you claim, they would have been vaporised. The two in the tunnel have been found, and seem to corroborate the story you transmitted to us once you were safely removed to the Uncleared. In the meantime, you may also be interested to know that the sweepers you left behind did encounter karakuri nests several hours later and two kilometres further west. In the ensuing suppression, there were twenty-seven deaths. Nine of them real, stack unrecovered.’
‘That is a tragedy,’ I said evenly. ‘But we would not have been able to prevent it. Had we returned with our injured and our damaged command systems, we would only have been a burden. Under the circumstances, we looked for ways to return to full operational strength as rapidly as possible instead.’
‘Yes. Your report says that.’
He brooded for a few moments. I flickered another look at Lazlo, in case he was about to open his mouth again. Kurumaya’s eyes lifted to meet mine.
‘Very well. You are billeted along with Eminescu’s crew for the time being. I will have a software medic examine Oshima, for which you will be billed. Allowing that her condition is stable, there will be a full investigation into the temple incident as soon as the weather clears.’
‘What?’ Lazlo took a step forward. ‘You expect us to fucking hang around here while you dig up that mess? No fucking way, man. We’re gone. Back to Tek’to on that fucking ’loader out there.’
‘Las—’
‘I do not expect you to stay in Drava, no. I am ordering it. There is a command structure here, whether you like it or not. If you attempt to board the Daikoku Dawn, you will be stopped.’ Kurumaya frowned. ‘I would prefer not to be so direct, but if you force me to, I will have you confined.’
‘Confined?’ For a couple of seconds, it was as if Lazlo hadn’t heard the word before and was waiting for the command head to explain it to him. ‘Fucking confined? We take down five co-ops in the last month, over a dozen autonomous mimints, render safe an entire bunker full of nasty hardware, and this is the fucking thanks we get coming back in?’
Then he yelped and stumbled back, open palm jammed to one eye as if Kurumaya had just poked him in it. The command head got to his feet behind the desk. His voice was sibilant with suddenly uncapped rage.
‘No. This is what happens when I can no longer trust the crews I am held responsible for.’ He jerked a glance at me. ‘You. Serendipity. Get him out of here, and convey my instructions to the rest of your companions. I do not expect to have this conversation again. Out, both of you.’
Las was still clutching at his eye. I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him out and he angrily shrugged it away. Muttering, he lifted a trembling finger to point at Kurumaya, then seemed to think better of it and turned on his heel. He made for the door in strides.
I followed him out. At the doorway, I looked back at the command head. It was hard to read anything in the taut face, but I thought I caught a waft of it coming off him nonetheless – rage at disobedience, worse still remorse at the failure to control both situation and self. Disgust at the way things had degenerated, in the command ’fab right here, right now, and maybe in the market free-for-all of the whole Mecsek Initiative. Disgust, for all I knew, at the way things were sliding for the entire damned planet.
Old school.
I bought Las a drink in the bar and listened to him curse Kurumaya for a fucking stick-up-the-arse piece of shit, then went to look for the others. I left him in good company – the place was crowded with irritable deComs off the Daikoku Dawn, complaining loudly about the weather and the subsequent lockdown on deployment. Superannuated fastload jazz formed a suitably strident backdrop, mercifully shorn of the DJ dissemination I’d come to associate with it over the past month. Smoke and noise filled the bubblefab to the roof.
I found Jadwiga and Kiyoka sitting in a corner, deep in each other’s eyes and a conversation that looked a little intense to try to join. Jad told me, impatiently, that Orr had stayed with Sylvie in the accommodation ’fab and that Oishii was around somewhere, at the bar maybe, talking to someone last time she saw him, anyway somewhere over in the direction of her vaguely waving arm. I took the multiple hints and left the two of them to it.