“We’re not,” I pointed out.

“Right.” His smile was pained. “Jesus, Takeshi. Why didn’t you hold back a couple of days. Could have halved your dosage. I’ve got everybody on standard anti-rad, we’ll all walk out of here with no worse than headaches.”

“Not my call.”

“No, I don’t suppose it was. Who’s the inactive?”

“Sun Liping.” It hurt more to look at her than I’d expected. Wolf pack allegiances are a slippery thing, it seems. “Systems officer.”

He grunted. “The others?”

“Ameli Vongsavath, pilot officer.” I pointed them out with a cocked finger and thumb. “Tanya Wardani, archaeologue, Jiang Jianping, Luc Deprez, both stealth ops.”

“I see.” Carrera frowned again and nodded in Vongsavath’s direction. “So if that’s your pilot, who was flying the assault launch when she blew?”

“Guy called Schneider. He’s the one put me onto this whole gig in the first place. Fucking civilian pilot. He got rattled when the fireworks started out there. Took the ship, trashed Hansen, the guy we left on picket, with the ultravibe and then just blew hatches, left us to—”

“He went alone?”

“Yeah, unless you want to count the riders in the corpse locker. We lost two bodies to the nanobes before we went through. And we found another six on the other side. Oh, yeah and two more drowned in the trawler nets. Archaeologue team from back before the war, looks like.”

He wasn’t listening, just waiting until I stopped.

“Yvette Cruickshank, Markus Sutjiadi. Those were the members of your team the nanobe system took out?”

“Yeah.” I tried for mild surprise. “You got a crew list? Jesus, these tower-dwellers of yours cut some mean corporate security.”

He shook his head. “Not really. These tower-dwellers are from the same tower as your friend over there. Rivals for promotion, in fact. Like I said, scum.” There was a curious lack of venom in his voice as he said it, an absent tone that seemed to my Envoy antennae to carry with it a tinge of relief. “I don’t suppose you recovered stacks for any of the nanobe victims?”

“No, why?”

“Doesn’t matter. I didn’t really think you would. My clients tell me the system goes after any built components. Cannibalises them.”

“Yeah, that’s what we guessed too.” I spread my hands. “Isaac, even if we had recovered stacks, they’d have been vaporised with just about everything else aboard the Nagini.”

“Yes, it was a remarkably complete explosion. Know anything about that, Takeshi?”

I summoned a grin. “What do you think?”

“I think Lock Mit fast assault launches don’t vaporise in mid-air for no reason. And I think you seem less than outraged about this guy Schneider running out on you.”

“Well, he is dead.” Carrera folded his arms and looked at me. I sighed. “Yeah, OK. I mined the drives. I never trusted Schneider further than a clingfilm condom anyway.”

“With cause, it appears. And lucky for you we came along, given the results.” He got up, brushed his hands together. Something unpleasant definitely seemed to have slid off his screen. “You’d better get some rest, Takeshi. I’ll want a full debriefing tomorrow morning.”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Not much more to tell, anyway.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s not what my scanners say. We registered more energy discharged on the other side of that gate in the last seven hours than the sum generating cost of every hypercast to and from Sanction IV since it was settled. Myself, I’d say there’s a reasonable chunk of story left to tell.”

“Oh, that.” I gestured dismissively. “Well, you know, galactic ancients’ automated naval engagement. No big deal.”

“Right.”

He was on his way out when something seemed to strike him.

“Takeshi.”

I felt my senses tilt like mission time.

“Yeah?” Striving to stay casual.

“Just out of curiosity. How did you plan to get back? After you blew the assault launch? You know, with the nanobes operative, the background rad count. No transport, except maybe that piece-of-shit trawler. What were you going to do, walk out? You’re barely two steps ahead of inactive, all of you. What the hell kind of strategy was blowing your only available ride out?”

I tried to think back. The whole situation, the upward-sucking vertigo of the Martian ship’s empty corridors and chambers, the mummified gaze of the corpses and the battle with weapons of unimaginable power raging outside—all of it seemed to have receded an immense distance into the past. I suppose I could have yanked it all back in with Envoy focus, but there was something dark and cold in the way, advising against it. I shook my head.

“I don’t know, Isaac. I had suits stashed. Maybe swim out and hang around at the edge of the gate broadcasting a mayday squawk across to you guys.”

“And if the gate wasn’t radio-transparent?”

“It’s starlight-transparent. And scanner-transparent, apparently.”

“That doesn’t mean a coherent—”

“Then I’d have tossed through a fucking remote beacon and hoped it survived the nanobes long enough for you to get a fix. Jesus, Isaac. I’m an Envoy. We make this sniff up on the fly. Worse-case scenario, we had a close-to-working claim buoy. Sun could have fixed it, set it to transmit and then we could all have blasted our brains out and waited until someone came out to take a look. Wouldn’t have mattered much—none of us have got more than a week left in these sleeves anyway. And whoever came out to check the claim signal would have had to re-sleeve us—we’d be the resident experts, even if we were dead.”

He smiled at that. We both did.

“Still not what I’d call leaktight strategic planning, Takeshi.”

“Isaac, you just don’t get it.” A little seriousness dripped back into my voice, erasing my smile. “I’m an Envoy. The strategic plan was to kill anyone who tried to backstab me. Surviving afterwards, well that’s a bonus if you can do it, but if you can’t.” I shrugged. “I’m an Envoy.”

His own smile slipped slightly.

“Get some rest, Takeshi,” he said gently.

I watched him walk out, then settled to watching Sutjiadi’s motionless form. Hoping the tetrameth would keep me up until he came round and found out what he had to do to avoid formal execution at the hands of a Wedge punishment squad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Tetrameth is one of my favourite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like no, you can’t fly without a grav harness or punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side-effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.

The comedown is no worse than most poisons.

I was starting to feel slightly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail-end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi over-vigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.

“Jiang, hey Jiang. Open your fucking eyes. Guess where we are.”

He blinked up at me, face curiously child-like.

“Whuhh—”

“Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.” The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades-in-arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. “Fucking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.”