Hand cleared his throat. “In point of fact, the Cartel are not entirely sure how many of Kemp’s missile drones are still deployed off-planet—”
“No shit,” grunted Hansen.
“—but to attempt high-orbit placement of any substantial platform at this stage would not be sufficiently—”
“Profitable?” asked Wardani.
Hand gave her an unpleasant smile. “Low risk.”
“We’re about to leave the Landfall HOG umbrella,” said Ameli Vongsavath over the intercom, tour-guide calm. “Expect some kinks.”
I felt a subtle increase in pressure at my temples as power diverted from the onboard compensators. Vongsavath getting ready for aerobatics around the curve of the world and down through re-entry. With the HOG setting behind us, there would be no more paternal corporate presence to cushion our fall back into the war zone. From here on in, we were out to play on our own.
They exploit, and deal, and shift ground constantly, but for all that you can get used to them. You can get used to their gleaming company towers and their nanocopter security, their cartels and their HOGs, their stretched-over-centuries unhuman patience and their assumed inheritance of godfather status for the human race. You can get so you’re grateful for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief of whatever little flange of existence they afford you on the corporate platform.
You can get so it seems eminently preferable to a cold gut-swooping drop into the human chaos waiting below.
You can get so you’re grateful.
Got to watch out for that.
“Over the rim,” said Ameli Vongsavath from the cockpit.
We dropped.
With the onboard comp running at combat minimum, it felt like the start of a grav jump, before the harness kicks in. My guts lifted to the base of my ribcage and the back of my eyeballs tickled. The neurachem fizzled sullenly to unwanted life and the bioalloy plates in my hands shivered. Vongsavath must have nailed us to the floor of Mandrake’s landing envelope and piled on everything the main drives would give her, hoping to beat any distant early-warned Kempist anti-incursion systems that might have decoded the flight path from Cartel traffic transmissions.
It seemed to work.
We came down in the sea about two kilometres off the Dangrek coast, Vongsavath using the water to crash cool re-entry surfaces in approved military fashion. In some places, environmental pressure groups have got violent over this kind of contamination, but somehow I doubted anyone on Sanction IV would be up for it. War has a soothing, simplifying effect on politics that must hit the politicians like a betathanatine rush. You don’t have to balance the issues any more, and you can justify anything. Fight and win, and bring the victory home. Everything else whites out, like the sky over Sauberville.
“Surface status attained,” intoned Vongsavath. “Preliminary sweeps show no traffic. I’m going for the beach on secondaries, but I’d like you to stay in your seats until advised otherwise. Commander Hand, we have a needlecast squirt from Isaac Carrera you might like to have a look at.”
Hand traded glances with me. He reached back and touched the seat mike.
“Run it on the discreet loop. Mine, Kovacs, Sutjiadi.”
“Understood.”
I pulled down the headset and settled the discreet reception mask over my face. Carrera came online behind the shrill warble of unravelling scrambler codes. He was in combat coveralls and a recently gelled wound was livid across his forehead and down one cheek. He looked tired.
“This is Northern Rim Control to incoming FAL 931/4. We have your flight plan and mission filed but must warn you that under current circumstances we cannot afford ground or close detail aerial support. Wedge forces have fallen back to the Masson lake system where we are holding a defensive stance until the Kempist offensive has been assessed and its consequences correlated. A full-scale jamming offensive is expected in the wake of the bombing, so this is probably the last time you’ll be able to communicate effectively with anyone outside the blast zone. Additional to these strategic considerations, you should be aware that the Cartel have deployed experimental nanorepair systems in the Sauberville area. We cannot predict how these systems will react to unexpected incursions. Personally,” he leaned forward in the screen, “my advice would be to withdraw on secondary drives as far as Masson and wait until I can order a reprise front back-up to the coast. This shouldn’t involve a delay of any more than two weeks. Blast research,” a ripple of distaste passed across his face, as if he had just caught the odour of something rotting in his wounds, “is hardly a priority worthy of the risks you are running, whatever competitive advantage your masters may hope to gain from it. A Wedge incoming code is attached, should you wish to avail yourself of the fallback option. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do for you. Good luck. Out.”
I unmasked and pushed back the headset. Hand was watching me with a faint smile tucked into one corner of his mouth.
“Hardly a Cartel-approved perspective. Is he always that blunt?”
“In the face of client stupidity, yes. It’s why they pay him. What’s this about experimental—”
Hand made a tiny shutdown gesture with one hand. Shook his head.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. Standard Cartel scare line. It keeps unwanted personnel out of the no-go zones.”
“Meaning you called it in that way?”
Hand smiled again. Sutjiadi said nothing, but his lips tightened. Outside, the engine note shrilled.
“We’re on the beach,” said Ameli Vongsavath. “Twenty-one point seven kilometres from the Sauberville crater. Pictures, anybody?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Clotted white.
For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.
“Gulls,” said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. “Radiation from the blast must have got them.”
Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.
When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV—and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter—they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.
The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded, with the minds of the colony elite decanted, awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.
Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.
Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.