Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging round the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn't had that much to say to each other either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scroll down and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.

"Have we really got to talk to all of them?"

Hand shook his head. "No, we really haven't. There's a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I'll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That's if you trust me that far."

I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.

"Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?"

We left for the roof.

Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun's juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening's warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.

I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.

The language mix reminded me.

"Tell me, Hand." I broke the seal on a new pack of Landfall Lights and drew one to life. "What was that s.h.i.t out at the market today? That language the three of you were speaking, the left-handed gestures?"

Hand tasted his coffee and set it down. "You haven't guessed?"

"Voodoo?"

"You might put it that way." The pained look on the exec's face told me he wouldn't put it that way in a million years. "Though properly speaking it hasn't been called that for several centuries. Neither was it called that back at the origin. Like most people who don't know, you're oversimplifying."

"I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking."

He smiled. "If that is the case, then the hard of thinking seem to be in a majority, do they not?"

"They always are."

"Well, perhaps." Hand drank more coffee and regarded me over the cup. "You really claim to have no G.o.d? No higher power? The Harlanites are mostly Shintoists, aren't they? That, or some Christian offshoot?"

"I'm neither," I said flatly.

"Then you have no refuge against the coming of night? No ally when the immensity of creation presses down on the spine of your tiny existence like a stone column a thousand metres tall?"

"I was at Innenin, Hand." I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. "At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without."

"G.o.d is not ours to command."

"Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He's playing a part, right?"

"Yes." There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand's voice now. "He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead-"

"Very witty."

"-in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his compet.i.tors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more." He offered me a slight smile. "Accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste."

"Strange this Ghede hasn't got around to making the same point, isn't it?"

Hand sighed. "Actually, it's very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humour of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused."

"Really." I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. "You believe this s.h.i.t, right? I mean, seriously?"

The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then he tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.

"Look at that, Kovacs. We're drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of G.o.d. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must must call them G.o.ds?" call them G.o.ds?"

I looked away, oddly embarra.s.sed by the fervour in Hand's voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.

"Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren't dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth's surface or built anything resembling a machine. I'd say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here."

Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself "That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in pre-industrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has travelled, from where and for how long. We walk amidst the ruins of a civilisation that apparently had G.o.dlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords-"

"Whoa." I lifted my hands, palms out. "Let's damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan's World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left."

"Yes." Hand gestured impatiently. "Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?"

"It's a f.u.c.king machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict-"

"Can you be sure of that?"

He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity stoked.

"Have you ever been to Harlan's World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I'm telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artefact-"

"What, no more mystical than the songspires?" His voice dropped to a hiss. "Trees of stone that sing to the rising and setting sun? No more mystical than a gate that opens like a bedroom door onto-"

He stopped abruptly and glanced around, face flushing with the near indiscretion. I sat back and grinned at him.

"Admirable pa.s.sion, for someone in a suit that expensive. So you're trying to sell me the Martians as voodoo G.o.ds. Is that it?"

"I'm not trying to sell you anything," he muttered, straightening up. "And no, the Martians fit quite comfortably into this world. We don't need recourse to the places of origin to explain them. I'm just trying to show you how limited your world view is without an acceptance of wonder."

I nodded.

"Very good of you." I stabbed a finger at him. "Just do me a favour, Hand. When we get where we're going, keep this s.h.i.t stowed, will you. I'm going to have enough to worry about without you weirding out on me."

"I believe only what I have seen," he said stiffly. "I have seen Ghede and Carrefour walk amongst us in the flesh of men, I have heard their voices speak from the mouths of the hougan, I have summoned summoned them." them."

"Yeah, right."

He looked at me searchingly, offended belief melting slowly into something else. His voice loosened and flowed down to a murmur. "This is strange, Kovacs. You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe."

That sat between us for almost a minute before I touched it. The noise from surrounding tables faded out and even the wind out of the north seemed to be holding its breath. Then I leaned forward, speaking less to communicate than to dispel the laser-lit recall in my head.

"You're wrong, Hand," I said quietly. "I'd love to have access to all this s.h.i.t you believe. I'd love to be able to summon someone who's responsible for this f.u.c.k-up of a creation. Because then I'd be able to kill them. Slowly."

Back in the machine, Hand's virtual self worked the long shortlist down to eleven. It took nearly three months to do it. Run at the AI's top capacity of three hundred and fifty times real time, the whole process was over shortly before midnight.

By that time, the intensity of the conversation up on the roof had mellowed, first into an exchange of experiential reverie, a kind of rummaging around in the things we had seen and done that tended to support our individual world views, and thence to increasingly vague observations on life threaded onto long mutual silences as we stared beyond the ramparts of the tower and out into the desert night. Hand's pocket bleep broke into the powered-down mood like a note shattering gla.s.s.

We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand's virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.

Final selection.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

In recall, their faces come back to me.

Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.

The faces of the dead.

Ole Hansen: Ludicrously pale Caucasian, cropped hair like snow, eyes the calm blue of the digit displays on medical equipment in non-critical mode. Shipped in whole from Latimer with the first wave of cryocapped UN reinforcements, back when everyone thought Kemp was going to be a six-month pushover.

"This had better not be another desert engagement." There were still patches of sunscorched red across his forehead and cheekbones. "Because if it is, you can just put me back in the box. That cellular melanin itches like f.u.c.k."

"It's cold where we're going," I a.s.sured him. "Latimer City winter at warmest. You know your team is dead?"

A nod. "Saw the flash from the 'copter. Last thing I remember. It figures. Captured marauder bomb. I told them to just blow the motherf.u.c.ker where it lay. You can't talk those things round. Too stubborn."

Hansen was part of a crack demolitions unit called the Soft Touch. I'd heard of them on the Wedge grapevine. They had a reputation for getting it right most of the time. Had had.

"You going to miss them?"

Hansen turned in his seat and looked across the virtual hotel room to the hospitality unit. He looked back at Hand.

"May I?"

"Help yourself."

He got up and went to the forest of bottles, selected one and poured amber liquid into a tumbler until it was brim full. He raised the drink in our direction, lips tight and blue eyes snapping.

"Here's to the Soft Touch, wherever their fragmented f.u.c.king atoms may be. Epitaph: they should have listened to f.u.c.king orders. They'd f.u.c.king be here now."

He poured the drink down his throat in a single smooth motion, grunted deep in his throat and tossed the gla.s.s away across the room underhand. It hit the carpeted floor with an undramatic thump and rolled to the wall. Hansen came back to the table and sat down. There were tears in his eyes, but I guess that was the alcohol.

"Any other questions?" he asked, voice ripped.

Yvette Cruickshank: A twenty-year-old, face so black it was almost blue, bone structure that belonged somewhere on the forward profile of a high-alt.i.tude interceptor, a dreadlocked mane gathered up the height of a fist before it spilled back down, hung with dangerous-looking steel jewellery and a couple of spare quickplant plugs, coded green and black. The jacks at the base of her skull showed three more.

"What are those?" I asked her.

"Linguapack, Thai and Mandarin, Ninth Dan Shotokan," she fingered her way up the braille-tagged feathers in a fashion that suggested she could probably rip and change blind and under fire. "Advanced Field Medic."

"And the ones in your hair?"

"Satnav interface and concert violin." She grinned. "Not much call for that one recently, but it keeps me lucky." Her face fell with comic abruptness that made me bite my lip. "Kept."

"You've requested rapid deployment posts seven times in the last year," said Hand. "Why is that?"

She gave him a curious look. "You already asked me that."

"Different me."

"Oh, I get it. Ghost in the machine. Yeah, well, like I said before. Closer focus, more influence over combat outcomes, better toys. You know, you smiled more the last time I said that."

Jiang Jianping: Pale Asiatic features, intelligent eyes with a slightly inward cast, and a light smile. You had the impression that he was contemplating some subtly amusing anecdote he'd just been told. Aside from the callused edges of his hands and a looseness of stance below his black coveralls, there was little to hint at his trade. He looked more like a slightly weary teacher than someone who knew fifty-seven separate ways to make a human body stop working.

"This expedition," he murmured, "is presumably not within the general ambit of the war. It is a commercial matter, yes?"

I shrugged. "Whole war's a commercial matter, Jiang."

"You may believe that."

"So may you," said Hand severely. "I am privy to government communiques at the highest level, and I'm telling you. Without the Cartel, the Kempists would have been in Landfall last winter."

"Yes. That is what I was fighting to prevent." He folded his arms. "That is what I died died to prevent." to prevent."

"Good," said Hand briskly. "Tell us about that."

"I have already answered this question. Why do you repeat it?"

The Mandrake exec rubbed at his eye.

"That wasn't me. It was a screening construct. There hasn't been time to review the data so, please."

"It was a night a.s.sault in the Danang plain, a mobile relay station for the Kempists' marauder-bomb management system."

"You were part of that?" I looked at the ninja in front of me with new respect. In the Danang theatre, the covert strikes on Kemp's communications net were the only real success the government could claim in the last eight months. I knew soldiers whose lives had been saved by the operation. The propaganda channels had still been trumpeting the news of strategic victory about the time my platoon and I were getting shot to pieces up on the Northern Rim.

"I was honoured enough to be appointed cell commander."