“Just didn’t know when to shut up, huh?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So what was he arguing? A war against another race? Somebody we haven’t run up against yet?”

Wardani shrugged. “That, or they just pulled out of this region of the galaxy and went somewhere else. He never really went far down either line of reasoning. Wycinski was an iconoclast. He was more concerned with tearing down the idiocies the Guild had already perpetrated than with constructing his own theories.”

“That’s a surprisingly stupid way to behave for someone so bright.”

“Or surprisingly brave.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Wardani shook her head. “Whatever. The point is, all the technology we’ve discovered that we understand, we can work.” She gestured at the banks of equipment ranged around the gate. “We have to synthesise the light from a Martian throat gland, and the sonics we think they produced, but if we understand it, we can make it work. You asked how come we were able to crack it last time. It was designed that way. Any Martian needing to get through this gate could open it. And that means, given this equipment and enough time, we can too.”

The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.

“You going?”

“I’ve got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?”

She looked at me strangely. “Nothing else, thanks.” She straightened up a little in the lounger. “I’ve got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I’ll be down to eat.”

“Good. See you then. Oh,” I paused on my way out. “What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something.”

“Tell him I’ll have this gate open inside two days.”

“Really?”

She smiled. “No, probably not. But tell him anyway.”

Hand was busy.

The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the centre of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.

“What the fuck are you doing, Hand?”

He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.

“I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me.”

“Yeah, he told me that. Now what the fuck are you doing?”

The moment hung. I read Hand. The body language said he was yawing close to violence, which was fine by me. Dying slowly was making me twitchy and keen to do harm. Any sympathy I’d had for him a couple of days back was fast evaporating.

Maybe he read me too. He made a downward spiral motion with his left hand, and the tension in his face smoothed out. He set the bowl aside and licked the surplus blood off his thumb.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Kovacs.”

“Let me guess.” I looked around at the candles. The smell of their incense was dark and acrid. “You’re calling up a little supernatural help to get us out of this mess.”

Hand reached back and snuffed the nearest of the candles without getting up. His Mandrake mask was back in place, his voice even. “As usual, Kovacs, you approach what you do not understand with all the sensitivity of a chimpanzee troop. Suffice it to say there are rituals that must be honoured if any relationship with the spirit realm is to be fruitful.”

“I think I can grasp that, just about. You’re talking about a pay-off system. Quid pro quo. A little blood for a handful of favours. Very commercial, Hand, very corporate.”

“What do you want, Kovacs?”

“An intelligent conversation. I’ll wait outside.”

I stepped back through the flap, surprised at a slight trembling that had set in in my hands. Probably unhandled feedback from the biocircuits in my palm plates. They were as twitchy as racing dogs at the best of times, intensely hostile to any incursions on their processing integrity, and they probably weren’t handling the radiation any better than the rest of my body.

Hand’s incense sat at the back of my throat like fragments of wet cloth. I coughed it out. My temples pulsed. I grimaced and made chimpanzee noises. Scratched under my arms. Cleared my throat and coughed again. I settled into a chair in the briefing circle and examined one of my hands. Eventually, the trembling stopped.

It took the Mandrake exec about five minutes to clear away his paraphernalia and he emerged looking like a close-to-functional version of the Matthias Hand we were used to seeing around camp. There were blue smears under each eye and his skin had an underlying greyish pallor, but the distance I had seen in the eyes of other men dying of radiation sickness was not there. He had it locked down. There was only the slow seeping knowledge of imminent mortality, and that you had to look for with Envoy eyes.

“I’m hoping this is very important, Kovacs.”

“I’m hoping it’s not. Ameli Vongsavath tells me the Nagini’s onboard monitoring system shut itself down last night.”

“What?”

I nodded. “Yeah. For about five or six minutes. It isn’t difficult to do—Vongsavath says you can convince the system it’s part of a standard overhaul. So, no alarms.”

“Oh, Damballah.” He looked out at the beach. “Who else knows?”

“You do. I do. Ameli Vongsavath does. She told me, I’ve told you. Maybe you can tell Ghede, and he’ll do something about it for you.”

“Don’t start with me, Kovacs.”

“It’s time for a management decision, Hand. I figure Vongsavath has to be clean—there was no reason for her to tell me about this otherwise. I know I’m clean, and I’m guessing you are too. Outside of that, I wouldn’t like to say who else we can trust.”

“Has Vongsavath checked the ship?”

“She says, as well as she can without take-off. I was thinking more about the equipment in the hold.”

Hand closed his eyes. “Yeah. Great.”

He was picking up my speech patterns.

“From a security perspective, I’d suggest Vongsavath takes the two of us up, ostensibly for a check on our nanosized friends. She can run the system checks while we go through the manifest. Call it late this afternoon—that’s a credible gap since the remotes kicked in.”

“Alright.”

“I’d also suggest you start carrying one of these where it can’t be seen.” I showed him the compact stunner Vongsavath had given me. “Cute, isn’t it. Navy standard issue apparently, out of the Nagini’s cockpit emergency box. In case of mutiny. Minimal consequences if you fuck up and shoot the wrong guy.”

He reached for the weapon.

“Uh-uh. Get your own.” I dropped the tiny weapon back into my jacket pocket. “Talk to Vongsavath. She’s tooled up, too. Three of us ought to be enough to stop anything before it gets started.”

“Right.” He closed his eyes again, pressed thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of his eyes. “Right.”

“I know. It feels like someone really doesn’t want us to get through that gate, doesn’t it. Maybe you’re burning incense to the wrong guys.”

Outside, the ultravibe batteries cut loose again.