I raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”

“It would appear,” he spoke slowly, as if the words tasted bad. “That I have overextended myself. We’ve been set up.”

“By?”

“You wouldn’t know them. Competitors.”

I seated myself again. “Another corporation?”

He shook his head. “OPERNS is a Mandrake package. We bought in the SUS-L specialists freelance, but the project is Mandrake’s. Sealed up tight. These are execs inside Mandrake, jockeying for position. Colleagues.”

The last word came out like spit.

“You got a lot of colleagues like that?”

That raised a grimace. “You don’t make friends in Mandrake, Kovacs. Associates will back you as far as it pays them to. Beyond that, you’re dead in the water if you trust anyone. Comes with the territory. I’m afraid I have miscalculated.”

“So they deploy the OPERN systems in the hope you won’t come back from Dangrek. Isn’t that kind of short-sighted? In view of why we’re here, I mean?”

The Mandrake exec spread his hands. “They don’t know why we’re here. The data’s sealed in the Mandrake stack, my access only. It will have cost them every favour they own just to find out I’m down here in the first place.”

“If they’re looking to take you down here…”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I saw new reasons why he wouldn’t want to take a bullet out here. I revised my estimate of the face-down. Hand hadn’t cracked, he’d calculated.

“So how safe is your remote storage?”

“From outside Mandrake? Pretty much impregnable. From inside?” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know. We left in a hurry. The security codes are relatively old. Given time.”

He shrugged.

“Always about time, huh?”

“We could always pull back,” I offered. “Use Carrera’s incoming code to withdraw.”

Hand smiled tightly.

“Why do you think Carrera gave us that code? Experimental nanotech is locked up under Cartel protocols. In order to deploy it, my enemies would have to have influence at War Council level. That means access to the authorisation codes for the Wedge and anyone else fighting on the Cartel side. Forget Carrera. Carrera’s in their pocket. Even if it wasn’t at the time Carrera gave it out, the incoming code is just a missile tag waiting to go operative now.” The tight smile again. “And I understand the Wedge generally hit what they’re shooting at.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Generally, they do.”

“So.” Hand got up and walked to the window flap opposite his bed. “Now you know it all. Satisfied?”

I thought it through.

“The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is…”

“That’s right.” He didn’t look away from the window. “A transmission detailing what we’ve found and the serial number of the claim buoy deployed to mark it as Mandrake property. Those are the only things that’ll put me back into the game at a level high enough to trump these infidels.”

I sat there for a while longer, but he seemed to have finished, so I got up to leave. He still didn’t look at me. Watching his face, I felt an unlooked-for twinge of sympathy for him. I knew what miscalculation felt like. At the exit flap, I paused.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Maybe you’d better say some prayers,” I told him. “Might make you feel better.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wardani worked herself grey.

She attacked the gate’s impassive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the assembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the scraps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.

When she was there, I stayed out of the way and watched her hunched figure through the ‘fab flap from a vantage point on the loading hatch of the Nagini. Close-focus neurachem reeled in the image and gave me her face intent over the sketchboard or the chiploader deck. When she went to the cave, I stood amidst the chaos of discarded technoglyph sketching on the floor of the bubblefab and watched her on the wall of monitors.

She wore her hair pulled severely back, but strands got out and rioted on her forehead. One usually made it down the side of her face, and left me with a feeling I couldn’t put in place.

I watched the work, and what it did to her.

Sun and Hansen watched their remote-sentry board, in shifts.

Sutjiadi watched the mouth of the cave, whether Wardani was working there or not.

The rest of the crew watched half-scrambled satellite broadcasts. Kempist propaganda channels when they could get them, for the laughs, government programming when they couldn’t. Kemp’s personal appearances drew jeers and mock shootings of the screen, Lapinee recruitment numbers drew applause and chant-alongs. Somewhere along the line, the spectrum of response got blurred into a general irony and Kemp and Lapinee started getting each other’s fanmail. Deprez and Cruickshank drew beads on Lapinee whenever she cropped up, and the whole crew had Kemp’s ideological speeches down, chanting along with full body language and demagogue gestures. Mostly, whatever was on kick-fired much-needed laughter. Even Jiang joined in with the pale flicker of a smile now and then.

Hand watched the ocean, angled south and east.

Occasionally, I tipped my head back to the splatter of starfire across the night sky, and wondered who was watching us.

Two days in, the remotes drew first blood on a nanobe colony.

I was vomiting up my breakfast when the ultravibe battery cut loose. You could feel the thrum in your bones and the pit of your stomach, which didn’t help much.

Three separate pulses. Then nothing.

I wiped my mouth clean, hit the bathroom niche’s disposal stud and went out onto the beach. The sky was nailed down grey to the horizon, only the persistent smouldering of Sauberville to mar it. No other smoke, no rinsed-out splash of fireglow to signify machine damage.

Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.

“You feel that?”

“Yeah.” I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. “Looks like we’ve engaged.”

She glanced sideways at me. “You OK?”

“Threw up. Don’t look so smug. Couple of days, you’ll be at it yourself.”

“Thanks.”

The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.

“That’s the bead,” said Cruickshank. “The first three were tracking shots. Now it’s locked on.”

“Good.”

The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal passages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.

“Do you mind?”

“Oh. Sorry.” She looked away.

I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.

Fuck.

“Where’s Sutjiadi?”

She pointed towards the Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the assault ship’s nose and Sutjiadi stood on it with Ole Hansen, apparently discussing some aspect of the vessel’s forward battery. A short distance up the beach, Ameli Vongsavath sat on a low dune and watched. Deprez, Sun and Jiang were either still at breakfast in the ship’s galley, or off doing something to kill the waiting.