Hand did not smile. I couldn't really blame him.

Corrosion within.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.

"Are those webs?" someone asked.

Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.

"That is fast work," said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. "But to me it looks defensive."

"For the moment," Hand agreed.

"Well, let's keep it that way." Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. "We've sat still long enough for this bulls.h.i.t. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag sh.e.l.ls into the middle of that stuff right now."

"They'll just learn to deal with it, Yvette." Hansen was staring into s.p.a.ce as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. "They'll learn and adapt on us again."

Cruickshank made an angry gesture. "Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn't it?"

"That sounds like sense to me." Sutjiadi stood up. "Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we've eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here."

Sutjiadi got what he wanted.

After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini Nagini's galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath's aerial footage into the ranging processor and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored sh.e.l.ls up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed coc.o.o.ns. The landward horizon caught fire.

I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we'd found in a locker on the bridge.

"Very pretty," said the a.s.sa.s.sin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his gla.s.s.

"And very crude."

"Well, it's a war."

He eyed me curiously. "Strange point of view for an Envoy."

"Ex-Envoy."

"Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety."

"When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya."

"Innenin."

"Yeah, Innenin too." I looked into the dregs of my drink.

"Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety."

"You reckon?" I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his gla.s.s.

"For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that f.u.c.k. War. Over."

"That's simplistic, Deprez." I poured refills. "He's got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?"

"Them too, of course." Deprez raised his gla.s.s. "Cheers. Probably, you'd have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It's a night's work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?"

I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. "Do I look like an accountant?"

"All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess."

"Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don't see them doing that either."

"No," said the a.s.sa.s.sin sombrely. "That would would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines." cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines."

"You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don't mind me saying so."

He shook his head.

"I know what I am," he said. "But it is a decision I have taken, and something I'm good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai-there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it."

I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I'd led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto's limbs and Tony Loemanako's face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn't been asking to die either.

Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my gla.s.s.

"Well, that's that."

"Do you think it will work?"

I shrugged. "Like Hansen says. For a while."

"So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons-the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?"

"Sharp sticks?"

"Are we close to opening the gate?"

"Why ask me? Wardani's the expert."

"You seem. Close to her."

I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.

"Are you staying out here?"

I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.

"No reason to leave yet that I can see."

He chuckled. "You do realise that we are drinking a collector's item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean," He gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be. "They aren't going to be making any more."

"Yeah." I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck towards the murdered city. I poured another gla.s.s full and raised it to the sky. "So here's to them. Let's drink the f.u.c.king bottle."

We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser's handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.

At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me: "Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?"

I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and 'tankhead' was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I'd been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops...

"No, of course not. Were you?"

"Of course I f.u.c.king was not. But the Envoys-"

"Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned s.h.i.t that in your saner moments you'd probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that's pretty much essential."

"Not really." Deprez wagged a finger. "They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn't even have to know know it hadn't had a real upbringing. You could it hadn't had a real upbringing. You could be be something like that for all you know." something like that for all you know."

I yawned. "Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It's something you live with every time you get re-sleeved, every time you get DHF'd, and you know how I know they haven't done that to me?"

"How?"

"Because there's no way way they'd programme an upbringing as f.u.c.ked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some f.u.c.king clone warrior that makes me, Luc." they'd programme an upbringing as f.u.c.ked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some f.u.c.king clone warrior that makes me, Luc."

He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.

"It brings you to think, though," he said, laughter drying up.

"What does?"

He gestured around. "All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it's all some military construct, man. Maybe it's a place to shunt us while we're dead, while they decide where to decant us next."

I shrugged. "Enjoy it while it lasts."

"You would be happy like that? In a construct?"

"Luc, after what I've seen in the last two years, I'd be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the d.a.m.ned."

"Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality."

"We differ over terms."

"You consider yourself d.a.m.ned?"

I downed more Sauberville whisky and grimaced past the burn. "It was a joke, Luc. I'm being funny."

"Ah. You should warn me." He leaned forward suddenly. "When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?"

"If it's not a personal question."

"We may die on this beach. Really die."

"Not if it's a construct."

"Then what if we are d.a.m.ned, as you say?"

"I don't see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you."

Deprez pulled a face. "We'll talk about something else, then. Are you f.u.c.king the archaeologue?"

"Sixteen."

"What?"

"Sixteen. I was sixteen. That's closer to eighteen, earth standard. Harlan's World orbits slower."

"Still very young."

I considered. "Nah, it was about time. I'd been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I'd come close a couple of times already."

"It was a gang killing?"

"It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we'd expected. The others ran, I got caught up." I looked at my hands. "Then I was tougher than he expected."

"Did you take his stack?"

"No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got re-sleeved, but I'd joined up by then. He wasn't connected enough to f.u.c.k with the military."

"And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death."

"I'm sure I would have got around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly f.u.c.ked run-up at this stuff?"

"Oh no," he said lightly. "It's in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historic links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military." He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. "You might say we were bred for it."

"So how does covert ops sit with your historic military family history? They disappointed you didn't end up with a command? If that's not a personal question."

Deprez shrugged. "Soldier's a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains."

"And your first?"