“It’ll do,” she said distantly. “I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.”

“Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.” A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.

“Yes.” Another pause. “Of course. This way.”

She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.

A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.

I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.

We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—

I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.

“Hand. What’s that?”

“That?” He saw where I was pointing. “Oh, that. Grey area.”

“I can see that.” Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. “What’s it doing there?”

But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the pre-knowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rock fall.

Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.

“It’s Sauberville,” she said flatly. “Isn’t it?”

Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. “That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The MAI posits a fifty per cent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.”

A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of a hundred and twenty thousand.

“Reduced how?” I asked.

Hand shrugged. “It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.”

“Tactical nuke,” said Schneider tonelessly. “Riding a marauder delivery system.”

“Well, it’s what he’s got.” Hand shrugged again. “And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.”

“Motherfucking psycho,” said Schneider, apparently to the sky.

Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she was trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.

“So.” Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. “Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.”

Wardani turned away. “It’s down on the beach,” she said.

The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale blue shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practised flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.

We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. She was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.

“That’s it.” She nodded ahead. “That’s where we buried it.”

“Buried it?” Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. “How exactly did you bury it?”

Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. “Use your eyes, man. How do you think?”

“You blew it up?”

“Bored charges.” Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. “Two metres in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.”

“You.” Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. “Blew up. An artefact?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.” Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. “Where do you think we found the fucking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery—this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.”

“I hope you’re right.” Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. “Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million UN dollars for damaged goods.”

“What brought the rock down?” I asked suddenly.

Schneider turned, grinning. “I told you, man. Bored—”

“No.” I was looking at Tanya Wardani. “I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction under water, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?”

“Yeah, Tanya,” Schneider nodded vigorously. “You never did nail that one, did you? I mean we talked about it, but…”

“It’s a good point.” Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. “What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?”

The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.

“Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.”

I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. “Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.”

“Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.”

“Leakage?” asked Hand dubiously.

Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy now Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the packet, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.