“You want to go to Latimer as well?” Hand raised an eyebrow. “Twenty million UN and passage offworld?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Hand. What did you expect? You think I want to wait around until Kemp and the Cartel finally decide it’s time to negotiate instead of fight? I don’t have that kind of patience.”

“So.” The Mandrake exec set down his chopsticks and steepled his hands on the table. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We pay you twenty million UN dollars, now. That’s non-negotiable.”

I looked back at him, waiting.

“Is that right?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll stop you if you get off track.”

The faint there-and-gone smile again. “Thank you. Then, upon successful completion of this project, we undertake to freight you, and presumably your associates, by needlecast to Latimer. Are those all of your demands?”

“Plus decanting.”

Hand looked at me strangely. I guessed he wasn’t used to his negotiations taking this path.

“Plus decanting. Any specifics I should know about there?”

I shrugged. “Selected sleeves, obviously, but we can discuss the specifics later. Doesn’t have to be custom. Something top of the range, obviously, but off the rack will do fine.”

“Oh, good.”

I felt a grin floating up, tickling the inner surfaces of my belly. I let it surface. “Come on Hand. You’re getting a fucking bargain, and you know it.”

“So you say. But it isn’t that simple, lieutenant. We’ve checked the Landfall artefact registry for the past five years, and there’s no trace of anything like the item you describe.” He spread his hands. “No evidence. You can see my position.”

“Yeah, I can. In about two minutes you’re about to lose the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years, and you’re going to do it because there’s nothing in your files about it. If that’s your position, Hand, I’m dealing with the wrong people.”

“Are you saying this find went unregistered? In direct breach of the Charter?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we sent you looked real enough for either you or your pet AI to authorise a full urban commando strike inside half an hour. Maybe the files got wiped, maybe they were corrupted or stolen. Why am I even discussing this? Are you going to pay us, or are you going to walk?”

Silence. He was pretty good—I still couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. He hadn’t shown me a single genuine emotion since we sat down. I waited. He sat back and brushed something invisible from his lap.

“I’m afraid this will require some consultation with my colleagues. I’m not authorised to sign off on deals of this magnitude, with this little up front. Authorisation for the DHF needlecasting alone will need—”

“Crap.” I kept it friendly. “But go ahead. Consult. I can give you half an hour.”

“Half an hour?”

Fear—the tiniest flicker of it at the narrowed corners of his eyes, but it was there and I felt the satisfaction come surging up from my stomach in the wake of the grin, savage with nearly two years of suppressed rage.

Got you, motherfucker.

“Sure. Thirty minutes. I’ll be right here. I hear the green tea sorbet’s pretty good in this place.”

“You’re not serious.”

I let the savagery corrode the edge of my voice. “Sure, I’m serious. I warned you about that. Don’t underestimate me again, Hand. You get me a decision inside thirty minutes or I walk out of here and go talk to someone else. I might even stiff you with the bill.”

He jerked his head irritably.

“And who would you go to?”

“Sathakarn Yu? PKN?” I gestured with my chopsticks. “Who knows? But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll work something out. You’ll be busy enough trying to explain to the policy board how you let this slip through your fingers. Won’t you?”

Matthias Hand compressed a breath and got up. He sorted out a thin smile and flashed it at me.

“Very well. I’ll be back shortly. But you have a little to learn about the art of negotiation, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

“Probably. Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time up north.”

I watched him walk away between the potential buyers on the balcony, and could not repress a faint shiver. If I was going to get my face lasered off, there was a good chance it would happen now.

I was banking hard on an intuition that Hand had licence from the policy board to do pretty much what he wanted. Mandrake was the commercial world’s equivalent of Carrera’s Wedge, and you had to assume a corresponding approach to latitudes of initiative at executive levels. There was really no other way for a cutting-edge organism to work.

Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.

Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.

Right, Takeshi?

My face twitched.

If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent re-sleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.

Don’t expect anything and—

And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.

Don’t—

Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.

This fucking war.

And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colours. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.

Sold.

CHAPTER TEN

Dangrek.

The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.

A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.

“Should be colder than this,” he said.

“Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.” I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. “This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?”

“Not as yet.” Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. “Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes…”

He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.