Carrera’s Wedge.

Propped up on the stretcher to the extent that the webbing allowed, I watched the whole thing and tried to damp down the sense of pride and belonging the wolf gene splice wanted me to feel.

“Welcome to base camp, lieutenant,” said Loemanako, dropping his fist to knock gently on my suit’s breastplate. “You’re going to be fine now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

His voice lifted in the comsystem. “Alright, people, let’s move. Mitchell and Kwok, stay suited and keep two of the bugs at standby. The rest of you, hit the shower—we’re done swimming for now. Tan, Sabyrov and Munharto, I want you back here in fifteen, wear what you like but tooled up to keep Kwok and Mitchell company. Everyone else, stand down. Chandra control, could we get some medical attention down here today, please.”

Laughter, rattling through the comset. There was a general loosening of stance around me, visible even through the bulk of vacuum combat gear and the non-reflective black polalloy suits beneath. Weapons went away, folded down, disconnected or simply sheathed. The bug riders climbed off their mounts with the precision of mechanical dolls and followed the general flow of suited bodies away down the beach. Waiting for them at water’s edge, the Wedge battlewagon Angin Chandra’s Virtue bulked on assault landing claws like some prehistoric cross between crocodile and turtle. Her heavily armoured chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.

It was good to see her again.

The beach, now I came to look at it, was a mess. In every direction as far as my limited vision could make out, the sand was torn up and furrowed around the shallow crater of fused glass the Nagini had made when she blew. The blast had taken the bubblefabs with it, leaving nothing but scorchmarks and a sparse few fragments of metal that professional pride told me could not possibly be part of the assault ship itself. The Nagini had airburst, and the explosion would have consumed every molecule of her structure instantaneously. If the ground was for dead people, Schneider had certainly won clear of the crowd. Most of him was probably still up in the stratosphere, dissipating.

What you’re good at, Tak.

The blast seemed to have sunk the trawler too. Twisting my head, I could just make out the stern and heat-mangled superstructure jutting above the water. Memory flickered brightly through my head—Luc Deprez and a bottle of cheap whisky, junk politics and government-banned cigars, Cruickshank leaning over me in—

Don’t do this, Tak.

The Wedge had put up a few items of their own to replace the vaporised camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few metres off the crater on the left, and down by the snout of the battlewagon, I picked out the sealed square cabin and the bulk pressure tanks of the polalloy shower unit. The returning vacuum commandos shucked their heavier items of weaponry on adjacent tent-canopied racks and filed in through the rinse hatch.

From the ‘Chandra came a file of Wedge uniforms with the white shoulder flash of the medical unit. They gathered around the stretchers, powered them up and shunted us off towards one of the bubblefabs. Loemanako touched me on the arm as my stretcher lifted.

“See you later, lieutenant. I’ll drop by once they got you shelled. Got to go and rinse now.”

“Yeah, thanks Tony.”

“Good to see you again, sir.”

In the bubblefab, the medics got us unstrapped and then unsuited, working with brisk, clinical efficiency. By virtue of being conscious, I was a little easier to unpack than the others, but there wasn’t much in it. I’d been without the anti-rad dosing for too long and just bending or lifting each limb took major efforts of will. When they finally got me out of the suit and onto a bed, it was as much as I could do to answer the questions the medic put to me as he ran a series of standard post-combat checks on my sleeve. I managed to keep my eyes jacked half open while he did it, and watched past his shoulder as they ran the same tests on the others. Sun, who was pretty obviously beyond immediate repair, they dumped unceremoniously in a corner.

“So will I live, doc?” I mumbled at one point.

“Not in this sleeve.” Prepping an anti-rad cocktail hypospray as he talked. “But I can keep you going for a while longer, I think. Save you having to talk to the old man in virtual.”

“What does he want, a debriefing?”

“I guess.”

“Well you’d better jack me up with something so I don’t fall asleep on him. Got any ‘meth?”

“I’m not convinced that’s a good idea right now, lieutenant.”

That merited a laugh, dredged up dry from somewhere. “Yeah, you’re right. That stuff’ll ruin my health.”

In the end I had to pull rank on him to get the tetrameth, but he jacked me. I was more or less functional when Carrera walked in.

“Lieutenant Kovacs.”

“Isaac.”

The grin broke across his scarred face like sunrise on crags. He shook his head. “You motherfucker, Kovacs. Do you know how many men I’ve had deployed across this hemisphere looking for you?”

“Probably no more than you can spare.” I propped myself up a little more on the bed. “Were you getting worried?”

“I think you stretched the terms of your commission worse than a squad bitch’s asshole, lieutenant. AWOL two months on a datastack posting. Gone after something that might be worth this whole fucking war. Back later. That’s a little vague.”

“Accurate, though.”

“Is it?” He seated himself on the edge of the bed, chameleochrome coveralls shifting to match the quilt pattern. The recent scar tissue across forehead and cheek tugged as he frowned. “Is it a warship?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Deployable?”

I considered. “Dependent on the archaeologue support you’ve got to hand, I’d say yes, probably.”

“And how’s your current archaeologue support?”

I glanced across the open space of the bubblefab to where Tanya Wardani lay curled up under a sheet-thin insulating quilt. Like the rest of the Nagini gang survivors, she’d been lightly sedated. The medic who did it had said she was stable, but not likely to live much longer than me.

“Wasted.” I started coughing, couldn’t easily stop. Carrera waited it out. Handed me a wipe when I finished. I gestured weakly as I cleaned my mouth. “Just like the rest of us. How’s yours?”

“We have no archaeologue aboard currently, unless you count Sandor Mitchell.”

“I don’t. That’s a man with a hobby, not an archaeologue. How come you didn’t come Scratcher-equipped, Isaac?” Schneider must have told you what you were buying into. I weighed it up, split-second, and decided not to give up that particular piece of information yet. I didn’t know what value it held, if any, but when you’re down to your last harpoon clip, you don’t go firing at fins. “You must have had some idea what you were buying into here.”

He shook his head.

“Corporate backers, Takeshi. Tower-dweller scum. You get no more air from people like that than you absolutely need to get aboard. All I knew until today was that Hand was into something big, and if the Wedge brought back a piece of it, it’d be made worth our while.”

“Yeah, but they gave you the codes to the nanobe system. Something more valuable than that? On Sanction IV? Come on Isaac, you must have guessed what it was.”

He shrugged. “They named figures, that’s all. That’s how the Wedge works, you know that. Which reminds me. That’s Hand over by the door, right? The slim one.”

I nodded. Carrera wandered over and looked intently at the sleeping exec.

“Yeah. Missing some weight off the pix I’ve got on stack.” He paced the makeshift ward, glancing left and right at the other beds and the corpse in the corner. Through the meth rush and the weariness, I felt an old caution go itching along my nerves. “ ‘Course, that’s not surprising, the rad count around here. I’m surprised any of you are still up and walking around.”