Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.

“A find,” said Semetaire lightly, and grinned.

One of the crab-legged remotes had returned from the pile and, having reached Semetaire’s foot, was working its way steadily up his trouser leg. When it reached the level of his belt, he plucked it off and held it still while, with the other hand, he prised something from the thing’s mandibles. Then he tossed the little machine away. It drew in its limbs as it sensed the freefall and when it hit the deck, it was a featureless grey ovoid that bounced and rolled to a quick halt. A moment later, the limbs extended cautiously. The remote righted itself and scuttled off about its master’s business.

“Ahhh, look.” Semetaire was rubbing the tissue-flecked stack between his fingers and thumb, still grinning. “Look at that, Wedge Wolf. Do you see? Do you see how the new harvest begins?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Mandrake AI read the stack-stored soldiers we’d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data, and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they’d do would be scream themselves hoarse.

Hand shrugged it off.

“That’s about standard,” he said. “There’s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We’ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters.”

I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers’ data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional analogue.

“Experience of high-rad combat environments?” I looked up at the Mandrake exec. “Is this something I should know about?”

“Come on, Kovacs. You already do.”

“I.” The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn’t seen light so harsh in geological eons. “Had hoped it wouldn’t turn out that way.”

Hand examined the table top as if it needed resheening. “We needed the peninsula cleared,” he said carefully. “By the end of the week it will be. Kemp’s pulling back. Call it serendipity.”

Once, on reconnaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I’d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail—even with the neurachem racked up to maximum the city looked like a silver bracelet, flung down at the water’s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.

I met Hand’s eyes across the table.

“So we’re all going to die.”

He shrugged. “It seems unavoidable, doesn’t it. Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run…”

“Yeah, well in the long run I’ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City.”

“Quite.”

“What kind of rad-tolerant sleeves you have in mind?”

Another shrug. “Don’t know for sure, I’ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?”

I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.

“I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.” I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. “This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don’t build better for combat than this stuff.”

“And the anti-rad?”

“It’ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we’re done?”

Hand frowned at the question. “Well. Employment.”

“They had that. Look where it got them.”

“Employment in Landfall.” For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. “Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Those are three very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don’t really subscribe to any of them. But if you’re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I’d say so. If it were me, I’d probably want in at that price.”

“A vote of confidence.” Hand’s tone was withering. “How reassuring.”

“Provided, of course, I didn’t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the back-data.”

He looked at me. “Are you trying to be funny?”

“I can’t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city.” I shrugged. “Just now, anyway. Maybe that’s just me.”

“Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?”

I smiled thinly. “Don’t be absurd, Hand. I’m a soldier.”

“Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don’t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune.”

“Isn’t it just.” I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it was a fused grenade. “So let’s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?”

According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.

It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.

The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake AI with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us three hundred and eighty-seven possibles, with a high probability core of two hundred and twelve.

“Time to wake them up,” said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.

Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging round the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn’t had that much to say to each other either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scroll down and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.

“Have we really got to talk to all of them?”

Hand shook his head. “No, we really haven’t. There’s a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I’ll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That’s if you trust me that far.”

I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.

“Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?”

We left for the roof.

Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun’s juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening’s warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.

I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.

The language mix reminded me.