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 was 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 tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.

It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours 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 artefacts 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 UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers 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 civilisation is still out there somewhere. My own personal favourite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilisation.

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 civilisation had the same cultural basics 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 centres 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 going and comes rushing across.”

“I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.”

At sub-light 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 etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.”

“How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist.”

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 north-west 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 got round? 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 question. “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.”