“I’m just warning you.”

“OK, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?”

“Outside of my own team?” She considered. “We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artefact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.”

“You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.”

“Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.”

“Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.”

“I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.”

“And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?”

“No.” She gave me a crooked smile. “The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realised what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.”

“And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?”

“Got it in one.” She shrugged. “It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, rubbished because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.”

I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.

“It sounds familiar enough.”

“I think,” She hesitated. “I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.” She smiled. “I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.”

She sighed and rid herself of the smile.

“Next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we’d lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we’d be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we’d be back from the academic wilderness of course, but only at a price. We’d be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn’t too much Wycinski in the text. There’d be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy,” she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad, “on someone else’s projects. We’d be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.”

“Better than not getting paid at all.”

A grimace. “If I’d wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically-appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.”

“Did the others feel that strongly?”

“In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.”

I nodded.

“Could that be who we found in the nets?”

She looked away. “I suppose so.”

“How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?”

“I don’t know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified, there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Techakriengkrai. They were all good. But on their own? Working backwards from our notes, working together?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I’ve got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don’t even know how I’ll perform any more.”

A memory of her beneath the waterfall flickered, unfairly, off the comment. It coiled around itself in my guts. I groped after the thread of my thoughts.

“Well, there’ll be DNA files for them in the Guild archives at Landfall.”

“Yes.”

“And we can run a DNA match from the bones—”

“Yes, I know.”

“—but it’s going to be hard to get through and access data in Landfall from here. And to be honest, I’m not sure what purpose it’ll serve. I don’t much care who they are. I just want to know how they ended up in that net.”

She shivered.

“If it’s them,” she began, then stopped. “I don’t want to know who it is, Kovacs. I can live without that.”

I thought about reaching for her, across the small space between our chairs, but sitting there she seemed suddenly as gaunt and folded as the thing we had come here to unlock. I couldn’t see a point of contact anywhere on her body that would not make my touch seem intrusive, overtly sexual or just ridiculous.

The moment passed. Died.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” I said, standing up. “You probably better do the same. Sutjiadi’s going to want a crack-of-dawn start.”

She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.

I left her alone amidst the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I’d taken to hold it down. There was grey light filtering through the bubblefab’s dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen…

Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see?

Semetaire?

I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider towelling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.

“Morning,” he frothed.

“Morning.” I propped myself upright. “What time is it?”

“Little after five.” He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. “Wouldn’t be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I’m a light sleeper.”

I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.

“Fucking psycho,” I grumbled.

“Hey, he’s in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.”

“Yeah, but Jiang’s the only one with insomnia, it appears.” I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it manifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.

Rush/snap!

“Haiii!!!”

“Right.”

I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. “I’m awake now. You finished with that brush?”

Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life and stepped into the shower niche.

Rise and shine.

Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clear-headed, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swivelling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the ‘fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.