“We pulled you out early,” she told me, the rage she’d exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. “On orders from Wedge Command. It seems there isn’t time for you to recover from your wounds fully.”
“I feel fine.”
“Of course you do. You’re dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you’re going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.”
I blinked. “I didn’t know they were spraying that stuff.”
“No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.” She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. “We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you’d probably make a full recovery. As it is . . .” She shrugged. “Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital’s axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them I knew.
“Hey, Lieutenant!”
Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid-regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.
“You made it out, Lieutenant! Way to go!”
He turned about in the crowd.
“Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.”
Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fiber. The new tissue looked wet and raw.
“Lieutenant. We thought—”
“Lieutenant Kovacs!”
Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.
“Good to see you, Lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The Three Ninety-one Platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.”
Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.
“Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?” said Munharto, gesturing flipperlike with his one remaining limb. “Seen the milflash yesterday.”
Kwok’s microcam swiveled, making minute hydraulic sounds.
“You taking the new Three Ninety-one, sir?”
“I don’t—”
“Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.”
I stayed off the axial deck after that.
• • •
Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said, for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.
“Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.”
It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides, we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d gotten shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.
“Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.” He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. “I really appreciate you not ah, not—”
“Forget it. I had.”
“Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.” I stirred impatiently. “Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—”
“Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.” I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. “All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now, if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?”
He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulturelike. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the vision port and the planet it showed.
“Exactly,” he said.
“Exactly what?”
Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.
“Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war not only alive but rich—richer than you can possibly imagine.”
“I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?”
I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. “Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—”
“Politics.” Schneider waved a hand dismissively. “This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single-figure percentage of their annual profits to own.”
I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and gotten medical attention that—at a progovernment estimate—half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.
I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.
“All right.”
“You’re in?”
“I’m listening,” I said mildly. “Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.”
Schneider sucked in his cheeks. “I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, Lieutenant. I need—”
“You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now, shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?”
There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.
“Well,” he said at last. “I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.”
“Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.”
I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers gener
ally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.
But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn’t show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.
“The Es, huh? When did you serve?”
“A while ago. Why?”
“You at Innenin?”
His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I were falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.
I closed my eyes briefly.
“Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?”
Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.
“Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?”
Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tight-wired for this kind of lost-civilization-and-buried-technotreasure bullshit.
It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilization, and people still haven’t worked out that the artifacts our extinct planetary neighbors left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.
This success, plus the scattered ruins and artifacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas, and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up designed by the U.N. to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travelers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilization is still out there somewhere. My own personal favorite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilization.
In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.
Schneider grinned. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, well, just hear me out.” He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. “See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us. Not like us physically; I mean, we assume their civilization had the same cultural bases as ours.”
Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.
“That means we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centers of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light-years out from the main Latimer system—that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins—but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re doing and comes rushing across.”
“I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.”
At sublight speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.
“Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?”
I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.
“So then,” he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, “you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first-come, first-served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.”
“For a percentage.”
“Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests et cetera et cetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centers of habitation, and that’s what they all did.”
“How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologue.”
He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription SANCTION IP PILOT’S GUILD, and the whole design was wreathed with the words THE GROUND IS FOR DEAD PEOPLE. It looked almost new.
I shrugged. “Nice work. And?”
“I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast northwest of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—”
“Scratchers?”
Schneider blinked. “Yeah. What about it?”
“This isn’t my planet,” I said patiently. “I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?”
“Oh. You know, kids.” He gestured, perplexed. “Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.”
“Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?”
“What?” He blinked again.
“Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said, They were mostly Scratchers, but— But who?”
Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.
“They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.”
“Or turn up too late to get a better stake.”
“Yeah.” For some reason he didn’t like that crack, either. “Sometimes. Point is, we—they—found something.”
“Found what?”
“A Martian starship.” Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. “Intact.”
“Crap.”
“Yes, we did.”
I sighed again. “You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship—no sorry, starship—and the news about this somehow hasn’t gotten around? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?”
Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.
“I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.”
“A gate?” Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the que
stion. “You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?”
“Kovacs, it’s a gate.” Schneider spoke as if to a small child. “We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.”
“Into the ship?” Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human beings in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.
“No.” He shook his head. “Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometers out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.”
“Or a shuttle.” I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. “What were you flying?”
He grimaced. “Piece-of-shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.”
“What?” I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. “Wouldn’t fit?”
“Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,” Schneider said morosely. “Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole program.”
“No one had a spacesuit?”
“What for?” Schneider spread his hands. “It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ’cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on-site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?”
“Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?”
“Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?”