“Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defence mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency.”

“You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?”

Hand shrugged. “Ask Kemp. He did it.”

“Alright then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that levelled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?”

“Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?” Hand looked sceptical. “After a year? Come on.”

“But what if you can’t stop it,” I said softly.

It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.

“What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioural protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.”

“Eva—” Hand saw where it was going and shut up.

“You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.”

The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.

“You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction IV,” asked Hand finally. “A behavioural virus?”

“Well it would explain the war,” said Vongsavath brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.

The tension shattered.

Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.

Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage—a faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armoury stock.

Fuck.

A third of the anti-radiation chemicals. Lost.

Back-up software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.

One functional buoy left.

Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.

Corrosion within.

“So what are you going to tell the rest?” Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.

I traded glances with Hand.

“Not a thing,” he said. “Not a fucking thing. We keep this between the three of us. Write it off to an accident.”

“Accident?” Vongsavath looked startled.

“He’s right, Ameli.” I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. “There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was powerpack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.”

Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.

Corrosion within.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.

“Are those webs?” someone asked.

Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.

“That is fast work,” said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. “But to me it looks defensive.”

“For the moment,” Hand agreed.

“Well, let’s keep it that way.” Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. “We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.”

“They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.” Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. “They’ll learn and adapt on us again.”

Cruickshank made an angry gesture. “Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?”

“That sounds like sense to me.” Sutjiadi stood up. “Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.”

Sutjiadi got what he wanted.

After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processor and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.

I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we’d found in a locker on the bridge.

“Very pretty,” said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass.

“And very crude.”

“Well, it’s a war.”

He eyed me curiously. “Strange point of view for an Envoy.”

“Ex-Envoy.”

“Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety.”

“When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.”

“Innenin.”

“Yeah, Innenin too.” I looked into the dregs of my drink.

“Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.”

“You reckon?” I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.

“For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that fuck. War. Over.”

“That’s simplistic, Deprez.” I poured refills. “He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?”

“Them too, of course.” Deprez raised his glass. “Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?”

I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. “Do I look like an accountant?”

“All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.”

“Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that either.”

“No,” said the assassin sombrely. “That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.”

“You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

He shook his head.

“I know what I am,” he said. “But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai—there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.”