CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ameli Vongsavath put us five kilometres up, flew about for a while and then kicked on the holding auto. The three of us crowded the cockpit and crouched around the flight display holo like hunter gatherers around a fire, waiting. When none of the Nagini’s systems had catastrophically failed three minutes later, Vongsavath pushed out a breath she seemed to have been holding since we stationed.

“Probably never was anything to worry about,” she said without much conviction. “Whoever’s been playing around in here isn’t likely to want to die with the rest of us, whatever else they might want to achieve.”

“That,” I said gloomily, “All depends on the level of your commitment.”

“You’re thinking Ji—”

I put a finger to my lips. “No names. Not yet. Don’t shape your thoughts ahead of time. And besides, you might want to consider that all our saboteur would really need is a little faith in their recovery team. We’d all still be stack-intact if this thing fell out of the sky, wouldn’t we.”

“Unless the fuel cells were mined, yes.”

“There you are, then.” I turned to Hand. “Shall we?”

It didn’t take long to find the damage. When Hand cracked the seal on the first high-impact shielded canister in the hold, the fumes that boiled out were enough to drive us both back up the hatch onto the crew deck. I slapped the emergency isolate panel and the hatch dropped and locked with a solid thump. I rolled onto my back on the deck, eyes streaming, hacking a cough that dug claws in the bottom of my lungs.

“Holy. Fuck.”

Ameli Vongsavath darted into view. “Are you guys—”

Hand waved her back, nodding weakly.

“Corrosion grenade,” I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. “Must have just tossed it in and locked up after. What was in this one, Ameli?”

“Give me a minute.” The pilot went back into the cockpit to run the manifest. Her voice floated back through. “Looks like medical stuff, mostly. Back-up plugins for the autosurgeon, some of the anti-radiation drugs. Both ID&A sets, one of the major trauma mobility suits. Oh, and one of the Mandrake declared ownership buoys.”

I nodded at Hand.

“Figures.” I pushed myself into a sitting position against the curve of the hull. “Ameli, can you check where the other buoys are stored. And let’s get the hold vented before we open this hatch again. I’m dying fast enough, without that shit.”

There was a drink dispenser on the wall above my head. I reached up, tugged a couple of cans free and tossed one to Hand.

“Here. Something to wash your alloy oxides down with.”

He caught the can and coughed out a laugh. I grinned back.

“So.”

“So.” He popped the can. “Whatever leakage we had back in Landfall seems to have followed us here. Or do you think someone from outside crept into the camp last night and did this?”

I thought about it. “It’s stretching credibility. With the nanoware on the prowl, a two-ring sentry system, and lethal-dose radiation blanketing the whole peninsula, they’d have to be some kind of psychotic with a mission.”

“The Kempists who got into the Tower at Landfall would fit that description. They were carrying stack burnouts, after all. Real death.”

“Hand, if I was going up against the Mandrake Corporation, I’d probably fit myself with one of those. I’m sure your counterintelligence arm have some really lovely interrogation software.”

He ignored me, following up his train of thought.

“Sneaking aboard the Nagini last night wouldn’t be a hard reprise for anyone who can crack the Mandrake Tower.”

“No, but it’s more likely we’ve got leakage in the house.”

“Alright, let’s assume that. Who? Your crew or mine?”

I tipped my head in the direction of the cockpit hatch and raised my voice.

“Ameli, you want to kick on the auto and get in here. I’d hate you to think we’re talking about you behind your back.”

There was a very brief pause, and Ameli Vongsavath appeared in the hatchway, looking slightly uncomfortable.

“Already on,” she said. “I, uh, I was listening anyway.”

“Good.” I gestured her forward. “Because logic dictates that right now you’re the only person we can really trust.”

“Thank you.”

“He said logic dictates.” Hand’s mood hadn’t improved since I hauled him out of prayers. “There are no compliments going down here, Vongsavath. You told Kovacs about the shutdown; that pretty much clears you.”

“Unless I was just covering myself for when someone opened that canister and discovered my sabotage anyway.”

I closed my eyes. “Ameli…”

“Your crew or mine, Kovacs.” The Mandrake exec was getting impatient. “Which is it?”

“My crew?” I opened my eyes and stared at the labelling on my can. I’d already run this idea through a couple of times since Vongsavath’s revelation, and I thought I had the logic sorted. “Schneider probably has the flyer skills to shut down the onboard monitors. Wardani probably doesn’t. And in either case someone would have had to come up with a better offer than.” I stopped and glanced towards the cockpit. “Than Mandrake has. That’s hard to imagine.”

“It’s been my experience that enough political belief will short-circuit material benefit as a motivation. Could either of them be Kempists?”

I thought back down the line of my association with Schneider

I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes

and Wardani

Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered… if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there

“I don’t see it, somehow.”

“Wardani was in an internment camp.”

“Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.”

Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.

“Alright, my crew,” he glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. “They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have got to them in that time.”

“Do you trust Semetaire?”

“I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.”

“I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?”

Hand rolled his eyes.

“Alright, who? Who’s your money on?”

“There is another possibility you’re not considering.”

He looked across at me. “Oh, please. Not the half-metre fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an expedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and,” I jabbed a thumb at the floor, “we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.”

Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. “Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?”

“Not that they noticed, no.” I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. “But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of… I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.”

Hand snorted. “Which does what exactly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.” I saw the way they were both looking at me. “Alright, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.”