We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand’s virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.
Final selection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In recall, their faces come back to me.
Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.
The faces of the dead.
Ole Hansen:
Ludicrously pale Caucasian, cropped hair like snow, eyes the calm blue of the digit displays on medical equipment in non-critical mode. Shipped in whole from Latimer with the first wave of cryocapped UN reinforcements, back when everyone thought Kemp was going to be a six-month pushover.
“This had better not be another desert engagement.” There were still patches of sunscorched red across his forehead and cheekbones. “Because if it is, you can just put me back in the box. That cellular melanin itches like fuck.”
“It’s cold where we’re going,” I assured him. “Latimer City winter at warmest. You know your team is dead?”
A nod. “Saw the flash from the ‘copter. Last thing I remember. It figures. Captured marauder bomb. I told them to just blow the motherfucker where it lay. You can’t talk those things round. Too stubborn.”
Hansen was part of a crack demolitions unit called the Soft Touch. I’d heard of them on the Wedge grapevine. They had a reputation for getting it right most of the time. Had had.
“You going to miss them?”
Hansen turned in his seat and looked across the virtual hotel room to the hospitality unit. He looked back at Hand.
“May I?”
“Help yourself.”
He got up and went to the forest of bottles, selected one and poured amber liquid into a tumbler until it was brim full. He raised the drink in our direction, lips tight and blue eyes snapping.
“Here’s to the Soft Touch, wherever their fragmented fucking atoms may be. Epitaph: they should have listened to fucking orders. They’d fucking be here now.”
He poured the drink down his throat in a single smooth motion, grunted deep in his throat and tossed the glass away across the room underhand. It hit the carpeted floor with an undramatic thump and rolled to the wall. Hansen came back to the table and sat down. There were tears in his eyes, but I guess that was the alcohol.
“Any other questions?” he asked, voice ripped.
Yvette Cruickshank:
A twenty-year-old, face so black it was almost blue, bone structure that belonged somewhere on the forward profile of a high-altitude interceptor, a dreadlocked mane gathered up the height of a fist before it spilled back down, hung with dangerous-looking steel jewellery and a couple of spare quickplant plugs, coded green and black. The jacks at the base of her skull showed three more.
“What are those?” I asked her.
“Linguapack, Thai and Mandarin, Ninth Dan Shotokan,” she fingered her way up the braille-tagged feathers in a fashion that suggested she could probably rip and change blind and under fire. “Advanced Field Medic.”
“And the ones in your hair?”
“Satnav interface and concert violin.” She grinned. “Not much call for that one recently, but it keeps me lucky.” Her face fell with comic abruptness that made me bite my lip. “Kept.”
“You’ve requested rapid deployment posts seven times in the last year,” said Hand. “Why is that?”
She gave him a curious look. “You already asked me that.”
“Different me.”
“Oh, I get it. Ghost in the machine. Yeah, well, like I said before. Closer focus, more influence over combat outcomes, better toys. You know, you smiled more the last time I said that.”
Jiang Jianping:
Pale Asiatic features, intelligent eyes with a slightly inward cast, and a light smile. You had the impression that he was contemplating some subtly amusing anecdote he’d just been told. Aside from the callused edges of his hands and a looseness of stance below his black coveralls, there was little to hint at his trade. He looked more like a slightly weary teacher than someone who knew fifty-seven separate ways to make a human body stop working.
“This expedition,” he murmured, “is presumably not within the general ambit of the war. It is a commercial matter, yes?”
I shrugged. “Whole war’s a commercial matter, Jiang.”
“You may believe that.”
“So may you,” said Hand severely. “I am privy to government communiqués at the highest level, and I’m telling you. Without the Cartel, the Kempists would have been in Landfall last winter.”
“Yes. That is what I was fighting to prevent.” He folded his arms. “That is what I died to prevent.”
“Good,” said Hand briskly. “Tell us about that.”
“I have already answered this question. Why do you repeat it?”
The Mandrake exec rubbed at his eye.
“That wasn’t me. It was a screening construct. There hasn’t been time to review the data so, please.”
“It was a night assault in the Danang plain, a mobile relay station for the Kempists’ marauder-bomb management system.”
“You were part of that?” I looked at the ninja in front of me with new respect. In the Danang theatre, the covert strikes on Kemp’s communications net were the only real success the government could claim in the last eight months. I knew soldiers whose lives had been saved by the operation. The propaganda channels had still been trumpeting the news of strategic victory about the time my platoon and I were getting shot to pieces up on the Northern Rim.
“I was honoured enough to be appointed cell commander.”
Hand looked at his palm, where data was scrolling down like some mobile skin disease. Systems magic. Virtual toys.
“Your cell achieved its objectives, but you were killed when they pulled out. How did that happen?”
“I made a mistake.” Jiang enunciated the words with the same distaste he had pronounced Kemp’s name.
“And what was that?” No one could have given the Mandrake exec points for tact.
“I believed the automated sentry systems would deactivate when the station was blown. They did not.”
“Oops.”
He flicked a glance at me.
“My cell could not withdraw without cover. I stayed behind.”
Hand nodded. “Admirable.”
“It was my error. And it was a small price to pay to halt the Kempist advance.”
“You’re not a big Kemp fan, are you, Jiang?” I kept my tone careful. It looked as if we’d got a believer here.
“The Kempists preach a revolution,” he said scornfully, “But what will change if they take power on Sanction IV?”
I scratched my ear. “Well, there’ll be a lot more statues of Joshua Kemp in public places, I imagine. Apart from that, probably not much.”
“Exactly. And for this he has sacrificed how many hundreds of thousands of lives?”
“Hard to say. Look, Jiang, we’re not Kempists. If we get what we want, I can promise you there’ll be a big renewed interest in making sure Kemp gets nowhere near power on Sanction IV. Will that do?”
He placed his hands flat on the table and studied them for a while.
“Do I have an alternative?” he asked.
Ameli Vongsavath:
A narrow, hawk-nosed face the colour of tarnished copper. Hair in a tidy pilot cut that was growing out, henna streaking black. At the back, tendrils of it almost covered the silvered sockets that would take the flight symbiote cables. Beneath the left eye, black tattooed cross-hatching marked the cheekbone where the dataflow filaments would go in. The eye above was a liquid crystal grey, mismatched with the dark brown of the right-hand pupil.