Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking—he’d already stalked away towards the water’s edge.

Something wasn’t right.

Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a swirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ‘fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms, separated by a central living space but two of the units had been assembled in a non-standard configuration with half the bedspace, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.

I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.

The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.

“What do you want?” she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

“It’s me.”

“I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?”

“An invitation over the threshold?”

She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.

“We’re not in virtual any more, Kovacs. I—”

“I wasn’t looking for a fuck.”

She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. “That’s just as well.”

“So do I get to come in?”

“Suit yourself.”

I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme—sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.

“Getting anywhere?”

“Slowly.” She yawned. “I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.”

I propped myself against a table edge.

“So how long do you reckon?”

She shrugged. “A couple of days. Then there’s testing.”

“How long for that?”

“The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?”

I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131 and all their numerous friends, like a ‘methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin, and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jewelled presence.

I twitched despite myself.

“I’m just curious.”

“An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.”

I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. “I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.”

“Well, I suppose you’d know.”

It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp—in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared—but she never flinched as the words came out.

“Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?”

“I told you we’re not in virtual any more.”

“No.”

I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,” she said heavily. “Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.”

“You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.”

“Is there something to talk about?” She didn’t look round.

“Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.” I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. “I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything either.”

That got her looking at me.

“Why?”

“Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.” I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. “And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.”

“You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?” she asked scornfully. “The vampires got them?”

“Something got them,” I said mildly. “They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.”

“Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. Any civilisation that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitise consciousness.”

“There’s no actual evidence for that.”

“Not even common sense?”

“Common sense?” The scorn was back in her voice. “The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes round the earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.”

“I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.”

“Yeah, haven’t we all,” she said shortly. “Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit re-sleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.”

“In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.”

“No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.”

“Do you believe it?”

She sighed and went back to her seat. “Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cosy little certainties human science is handing round. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half of the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living-room wall.” She paused. “And it’s probably upside down.”

I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the ‘fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.

“No, I mean it,” she muttered. “You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.”

“OK, fine.” I followed her back to the centre of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando, the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind, was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. “But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.”