“My contract is what keeps me in the military. I have another ten years to serve, minimum. And if I’m honest,” she shrugged. “I’ll probably stay on after that. The war will be over by then.”

“Always more wars.”

“Not on Sanction IV. Once they’ve crushed Kemp, there’ll be a clampdown. Strictly police actions from then on. They’ll never let it get out of hand like this again.”

I thought about Hand’s exultation at the no-holds-barred licensing protocols Mandrake were currently running on, and I wondered.

Aloud, I said, “A police action can get you killed just as dead as a war.”

“I’ve been dead. And now look at me. It wasn’t so bad.”

“Alright, Sun.” I felt a wavefront of new weariness wash through me, turning my stomach and hurting my eyes. “I give up. You’re one tough motherfucker. You should be telling this stuff to Cruickshank. She’d eat it up.”

“I do not think Yvette Cruickshank needs any encouragement. She is young enough to be enjoying this for itself.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“And if I appear a tough motherfucker to you, it was not my intention. But I am a career soldier, and it would be foolish to build resentment against that choice. It was a choice. I was not conscripted.”

“Yeah, well these days that’s…” The edge ebbed out of my voice as I saw Schneider drop from the forward hatch of the Nagini and sprint up the beach. “Where’s he going?”

Below us, from under the angle of the ledge we were seated on, Tanya Wardani emerged. She was walking roughly seaward, but there was something odd about her gait. Her coat seemed to shimmer blue down one side in granular patches that looked vaguely familiar.

I got to my feet. Racked up the neurachem.

Sun laid a hand on my arm. “Is she—”

It was sand. Patches of damp turquoise sand from the inside of the cavern. Sand that must have clung when—

She crumpled.

It was a graceless fall. Her left leg gave out as she put it down and she pivoted round and downwards around the buckling limb. I was already in motion, leaping down from the ledge in a series of neurachem-mapped footholds, each one good only for momentary bracing and then on to the next before I could slip. I landed in the sand about the same time Wardani completed her fall and was at her side a couple of seconds before Schneider.

“I saw her fall when she came out of the cave,” he blurted as he reached me.

“Let’s get her—”

“I’m fine.” Wardani turned over and shook off my arm. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked from Schneider to me and back. I saw, abruptly, how haggard she had become. “Both of you, I’m fine. Thanks.”

“So what’s going on?” I asked her quietly.

“What’s going on?” She coughed and spat in the sand, phlegm streaked with blood. “I’m dying, just like everyone else in this neighbourhood. That’s what’s going on.”

“Maybe you’d better not do any more work today,” said Schneider hesitantly. “Maybe you should rest.”

She shot him a quizzical look, then turned her attention to getting up.

“Oh, yeah.” She heaved herself upright and grinned. “Forgot to say. I opened the gate. Cracked it.”

I saw blood in the grin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I don’t see anything,” said Sutjiadi.

Wardani sighed and walked to one of her consoles. She hit a sequence of screen panels and one of the stretch-filigrees eased down until it stood between us and the apparently impenetrable spike of Martian technology in the centre of the cavern. Another screen switch and lamps seated in the corners of the cavern went incandescent with blue.

“There.”

Through the stretchscreen, everything was bathed in cool violet light. In the new colour scheme, the upper edges of the gate flickered and ran with gobs of brilliance that slashed through the surrounding glow like revolving biohazard cherries.

“What is that?” asked Cruickshank at my back.

“It’s a countdown,” said Schneider with dismissive familiarity. He’d seen this before. “Right, Tanya.”

Wardani smiled weakly and leaned on the console.

“We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do. A lot of their visual notation seems to refer to bands in the ultraviolet range.” She cleared her throat. “They’d be able to see this unaided. And what it’s saying, more or less, is: stand clear.”

I watched, fascinated. Each blob seemed to ignite at the peak of the spire and then separate and drip rapidly along the leading edges to the base. At intervals along the drip down, the lights fired bursts off themselves into the folding that filled the splits between the edges. It was hard to tell, but if you tracked the trajectory of these offbursts, they seemed to be travelling a long way into the cramped geometry of each crack, a longer distance than they had any right to in three-dimensional space.

“Some of it becomes visual later,” said Wardani. “The frequency scales down as we get nearer to the event. Not sure why.”

Sutjiadi turned aside. In the splashes of rendered light through the filigree screen, he looked unhappy.

“How long?” he asked.

Wardani lifted an arm and pointed along the console to the scrambling digits of a countdown display. “About six hours, standard. A little less now.”

“Samedi’s sake, that is beautiful.” breathed Cruickshank. She stood at my shoulder and stared entranced at the screened spike and what was happening to it. The light passing over her face seemed to have washed her features of every emotion but wonder.

“We’d better get that buoy up here, captain.” Hand was peering into the explosions of radiance with an expression I hadn’t seen since I surprised him at worship. “And the launching frame. We’ll need to fire it across.”

Sutjiadi turned his back on the gate. “Cruickshank. Cruickshank!”

“Sir.” The Limon woman blinked and looked at him, but her eyes kept tugging back towards the screen.

“Get back down to the Nagini and help Hansen prep the buoy for firing. And tell Vongsavath to get a launch and landing mapped for tonight. See if she can’t break through some of this jamming and transmit to the Wedge at Masson. Tell them we’re coming out.” He looked across at me. “I’d hate to get shot down by friendly fire at this stage.”

I glanced at Hand, curious to see how he’d handle this one.

I needn’t have worried.

“No transmissions just yet, captain.” The executive’s voice was a study in absent detachment—you would have sworn he was absorbed in the gate countdown—but under the casual tone there was the unmistakable tensile strength of an order given. “Let’s keep this on a need-to-know basis until we’re actually ready to go home. Just get Vongsavath to map the parabola.”

Sutjiadi wasn’t stupid. He heard the cabling buried in Hand’s voice and shot me another look, questioning.

I shrugged, and weighed in on the side of Hand’s deception. What are Envoys for, after all?

“Look at it this way, Sutjiadi. If they knew you were on board, they’d probably shoot us down anyway, just to get to you.”

“Carrera’s Wedge,” said Hand stiffly, “will do no such thing while they are under contract to the Cartel.”

“Don’t you mean the government?” jeered Schneider. “I thought this war was an internal matter, Hand.”

Hand shot him a weary look.

“Vongsavath.” Sutjiadi had chinned his mike to the general channel. “You there?”

“In place.”

“And the rest of you?”

Four more voices thrummed in the induction mike at my ear. Hansen and Jiang taut with alertness, Deprez laconic and Sun somewhere in between.

“Map a launch and landing. Here to Landfall. We expect to be out of here in another seven hours.”

A round of cheers rang through the induction mike at my ear.

“Try to get some idea of what the suborbital traffic’s like along the curve, but maintain transmission silence until we lift. Is that clear?”