“You don’t sound too convinced.”

Wardani plumed smoke into the night. “I’m not. Like Wycinski said at the time, so fucking what? Carter and Bogdanovich completely missed the point. By accepting the validity of what Wycinski said about Martian spatial perceptions, they should have also seen that the whole concept of hegemony was probably outside Martian terms of reference.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.” The thin smile again, more forced this time. “That’s where it started to get political. Wycinski went on record with that, saying that wherever the Martian race had originated, there was no reason to suppose that the mother world would be accorded any more importance in the scheme of things than quote absolutely essential in matters of basic factual education unquote.”

“Mummy, where do we come from? That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing exactly. You might point it out on the map, that’s where we all came from once, but since where we are now is far more important in real, day-to-day terms, that’s about as far as the mother world homage would ever get.”

“I don’t suppose Wycinski ever thought to disown this view of things as intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman, did he?”

Wardani gave me a sharp look. “How much do you really know about the Guild, Kovacs?”

I held up finger and thumb a modest span apart. “Sorry, I just like to show off. I’m from Harlan’s World. Minoru and Gretzky went to trial about the time I got into my teens. I was in a gang. Standard proof of how antisocial you were was to carve air graffiti about the trial in a public place. We all had the transcripts by heart. Intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman came up a lot in Gretzky’s recantation. Seemed like it was the standard Guild statement for keeping your research grants intact.”

She lowered her gaze. “It was, for a while. And no, Wycinski wouldn’t play that tune. He loved the Martians, he admired them, and he said so in public. That’s why you only hear about him in connection with fucking hub theory. They pulled his funding, suppressed most of his findings and gave it all to Carter and Bogdanovich to run with. And what a blowjob those two whores gave in return. The UN commission voted a seven per cent increase in the Protectorate strategic budget the same year, all based on paranoid fantasies of a Martian overculture somewhere out there waiting to jump us.”

“Neat.”

“Yeah, and totally impossible to disprove. All the astrogation charts we’ve recovered on other worlds bear out Wycinski’s finding—each world centres itself on the map the way Mars did, and that single fact is used to scare the UN into keeping a high strategic budget and a tight military presence across the whole Protectorate. No one wants to hear about what Wycinski’s research really means, and anybody who talks too loud about it, or tries to apply the findings in research of their own is either defunded overnight or ridiculed, which in the end comes to the same thing.”

She flicked her cigarette into the fire and watched it flare up.

“That what happened to you?” I asked.

“Not quite.”

There was a palpable click to the last syllable, like a lock turning. Behind me, I could hear Schneider coming up the beach, his checklist for the shuttle or maybe just his patience exhausted. I shrugged.

“Talk about it later, you want to.”

“Maybe. How about you tell me what all that macho high-G manoeuvre bullshit was today?”

I glanced up at Schneider as he joined us beside the fire. “Hear that? Complaint about the in-flight entertainment.”

“Fucking passengers,” Schneider grunted, picking up the clowning cue flawlessly as he lowered himself to the sand. “Nothing ever changes.”

“You going to tell her, or shall I?”

“Was your idea. Got a Seven?”

Wardani held up the packet, then tossed them into Schneider’s grasp. She turned back to me. “Well?”

“The Dangrek coast,” I said slowly, “whatever its archaeological merits may have been, is part of the Northern Rim territories and the Northern Rim has been designated by Carrera’s Wedge as one of nine primary objectives in winning the war. And judging from the amount of organic damage going on up there at the moment, the Kempists have come to the same conclusion.”

“So?”

“So, mounting an archaeological expedition while Kemp and the Wedge are up there fighting for territorial dominance isn’t my idea of smart. We have to get the fighting diverted.”

“Diverted?” The disbelief in her voice was gratifying to hear. I played to it, shrugging again.

“Diverted, or postponed. Whatever works. The point is, we need help. And the only place we’re going to get help of that order is from the corporates. We’re going to Landfall, and since I’m supposed to be on active service, Schneider’s a Kempist deserter, you’re a prisoner-of-war and this is a stolen shuttle, we need to shed a little heat before we do that. Satellite coverage of our little run-in with the smart mines back there will read like they took us down. A search of the seabed will show up pieces of wreckage compatible with that. Allowing that no one looks at the evidence too closely, we’ll be filed as missing presumed vaporised, which suits me fine.”

“You think they’ll let it go at that?”

“Well, it’s a war. People getting killed shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.” I picked a stray length of wood out of the fire and started tracing a rough continental map in the sand. “Oh, they may wonder what I was doing down here when I’m supposed to be taking up a command on the Rim, but that’s the kind of detail that gets sifted in the aftermath of a conflict. Right now, Carrera’s Wedge are spread pretty thin in the north and Kemp’s forces are still pushing them towards the mountains. They’ve got the Presidential Guard coming in on this flank,” I prodded at the sand with my makeshift pointer, “And sea-launched air strikes from Kemp’s iceberg fleet over here. Carrera’s got a few more important things to worry about than the exact manner of my demise.”

“And you really think the Cartel are going to put all that on hold just for you?” Tanya Wardani swung her burning gaze from my face to Schneider’s. “You didn’t really buy into this, did you, Jan?”

Schneider made a small gesture with one hand. “Just listen to the man, Tanya. He’s jacked into the machine, he knows what he’s talking about.”

“Yeah, right.” The intense, hectic eyes snapped back to me. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for getting me out of the camp, because I am. I don’t think you can imagine quite how grateful I am. But now I’m out, I’d quite like to live. This, this plan, is all bullshit. You’re just going to get us all killed, either in Landfall by corporate samurai or caught in the crossfire at Dangrek. They aren’t going to—”

“You’re right,” I said patiently, and she shut up, surprised. “To a point, you’re right. The major corporates, the ones in the Cartel, they wouldn’t give this scheme a second glance. They can murder us, stick you into virtual interrogation until you tell them what they want to know and then just keep the whole thing under wraps until this war is over and they’ve won.”

“If they win.”

“They will,” I told her. “They always do, one way or the other. But we aren’t going to the majors. We’ve got to be smarter than that.”

I paused and poked at the fire, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how Schneider craned forward with tension. Without Tanya Wardani aboard, the whole thing was dead in the water and we all knew it.

The sea whispered itself up on the beach and back. Something popped and crackled in the depths of the fire.

“Alright.” She moved slightly, like someone bedridden shifting to a less aching posture. “Go on. I’m listening.”

Relief gusted out of Schneider audibly. I nodded.

“This is what we do. We target one corporate operator in particular, one of the smaller, hungrier ones. Might take a while to sound out, but it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we’ve got the target, we make them an offer they can’t refuse. A one-time only, limited period, bargain basement, satisfaction guaranteed purchase.”