“The Wedge? That’s.” Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. “Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.”
I sat back again, on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.
“They came looking for me.” For all the pretense, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. “You believe that?”
“If you say so.” Sutjiadi propped himself up. “Who else made it out?”
“All of us except Sun.” I gestured. “And she’s retrievable.”
His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. “Back there. Did you. See?”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“They were ghosts,” he said, biting down on the words.
“Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.”
“That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.” Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. “Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?”
I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. “What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.”
She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.
“Good for you.” Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. “So who do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?”
“Take your pick.”
After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity—a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breath this stuff for a living.
Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage between us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.
“At least,” I said at one point, “We know why they left the fucking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near-miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.”
“I,” said Deprez emphatically, “Do not. Believe. In ghosts.”
“That didn’t seem to bother them.”
“Do you think,” Vongsavath, picking her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide, “all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?”
Wardani shook her head. “If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.”
“I felt,” Sutjiadi swallowed. “They were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilisation far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, any more. Maybe they evolved past that.”
I grunted. “Neat trick, if you can manage it.”
“And we apparently can’t,” said Wardani.
“Maybe we would have, if that kind of thing was left floating around every time we committed mass murder.”
“Kovacs, that’s absurd,” Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. “All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction IV? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.”
“Bravo, Hand.” Vongsavath clapped a handful of slow, sardonic applause. “You should have been a political officer. Just one problem with your muscular humanism there—that second ship wasn’t Martian. Right Mistress Wardani? Totally different config.”
All eyes fixed on the archaeologue, who sat with her head bowed. Finally, she looked up, met my gaze and nodded reluctantly.
“It did not look like any Martian technology I have ever seen or heard of.” She drew a deep breath. “On the evidence I saw. It would appear the Martians were at war with someone else.”
The unease rose from the floor again, winding among us like cold smoke, chilling the conversation to a halt. A tiny premonition of the wake-up call humanity was about to get.
We do not belong out here.
A few centuries we’ve been let out to play on these three dozen worlds the Martians left us but the playground has been empty of adults all that time, and with no supervision there’s just no telling who’s going to come creeping over the fence or what they’ll do to us. Light is fading from the afternoon sky, retreating across distant rooftops, and in the empty streets below it’s suddenly a cold and shadowy neighbourhood.
“This is nonsense,” said Hand. “The Martian domain went down in a colonial revolt, everyone agrees on that. Mistress Wardani, the Guild teaches that.”
“Yeah, Hand.” The scorn in Wardani’s voice was withering. “And why do you think they teach that? Who allocates Guild funding, you blinkered fuckwit? Who decides what our children will grow up believing?”
“There is evidence—”
“Don’t fucking talk to me about evidence.” The archaeologue’s wasted face lit with fury. For a moment I thought she was going to physically assault the executive. “You ignorant motherfucker. What do you know about the Guild? I do this for a living, Hand. Do you want me to tell you how much evidence has been suppressed because it didn’t suit the Protectorate worldview? How many researchers were branded antihuman and ruined, how many projects butchered, all because they wouldn’t ratify the official line? How much shit the appointed Guild Chancellors spurt every time the Protectorate sees fit to give them a funding handjob?”
Hand seemed taken aback by the sudden eruption of rage from this haggard, dying woman. He fumbled. “Statistically, the chances of two starfaring civilisations evolving so close to—”
But it was like walking into the teeth of a gale. Wardani had her own emotional ‘meth shot now. Her voice was a lash.
“Are you mentally defective? Or weren’t you paying attention when we opened the gate? That’s instant matter transmission across interplanetary distance, technology that they left lying around. You think a civilisation like that is going to be limited to a few hundred cubic light years of space? The weaponry we saw in action out there was faster than light. Those ships could both have come from the other side of the fucking galaxy. How would we know?”
The quality of light shifted as someone opened the bubblefab flap. Glancing away from Wardani’s face for a moment, I saw Tony Loemanako stood in the entrance to the bubblefab, wearing noncom-flashed chameleochrome and trying not to grin.
I raised a hand. “Hello, Tony. Welcome to the hallowed chambers of academic debate. Feel free to ask if you don’t follow any of the technical terms.”