“Lieutenant?”

“Coming.” I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.

Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.

“Problem?”

“No. Get rid of these kids.”

Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child’s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.

“You’re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren’t all bad,” I said quietly.

Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. “That’s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show’s over.”

The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.

“Where’d you get those things?”

“Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn’t have much use for them.”

“No, they’ve already shot all the refugees down there.” I nodded at the departing children, now chattering excitedly over their new acquisitions. “The camp militia’ll probably confiscate the lot once we’re gone.”

Schneider shrugged. “I know. But I’d already given out the chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?”

It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring out the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.

“Here she comes,” said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.

Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgement.

She swayed, stumbled and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.

“Tanya Wardani,” said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar code strips and a scanner. “I’ll need your ID for the release.”

I cocked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impassively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.

“Lieutenant.”

“Yes, what is it?” Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.

“Will she be coming back?”

I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.

“No, sergeant,” I said, as if to a small child. “She won’t be coming back. She’s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her.”

I closed the hatch.

But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.

He didn’t even bother to shield his face from the dust.

We flew west from the camp on grav effect, over a mixture of desert scrub and blots of darker vegetation where the planet’s flora had managed to get a lock on shallow-running aquifers. About twenty minutes later we picked up the coast and headed out to sea over waters that Wedge military intelligence said were infested with Kempist smart mines. Schneider kept our speed down, subsonic the whole time. Easy to track.

I spent the early part of the flight in the main cabin, ostensibly going through a current affairs datastack that the shuttle was pulling down from one of Carrera’s command satellites, but in reality watching Tanya Wardani with an Envoy-tuned eye. She sat slumped in the seat furthest from the hatch and hence closest to the right side viewports, forehead resting against the glass. Her eyes were open, but whether she was focusing on the ground below was hard to tell. I didn’t try to speak to her—I’d seen the same mask on a thousand other faces this year, and I knew she wasn’t coming out from behind it until she was ready, which might be never. Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. Lately, they’ve been calling it War Shock Syndrome, an all encompassing term which bleakly but rather neatly puts the writing on the wall for those who would like to treat it. There may be a plethora of more and less effective psychological techniques for repair, but the ultimate aim of any medical philosophy, that of prevention rather than cure, is in this case clearly beyond the wit of humanity to implement.

To me it comes as no surprise that we’re still flailing around with Neanderthal spanners in the elegant wreckage of Martian civilisation without really having a clue how all that ancient culture used to operate. After all, you wouldn’t expect a butcher of farm livestock to understand or be able to take over from a team of neurosurgeons. There’s no telling how much irreparable damage we may have already caused to the body of knowledge and technology the Martians have unwisely left lying around for us to discover. In the end, we’re not much more than a pack of jackals, nosing through the broken bodies and wreckage of a plane crash.

“Coming up on the coast,” Schneider’s voice said over the intercom. “You want to get up here?”

I lifted my face away from the holographic data display, flattened the data motes to the base and looked across at Wardani. She had shifted her head slightly at the sound of Schneider’s voice, but the eyes that found the speaker set in the roof were still dulled with emotional shielding. It hadn’t taken me very long to extract from Schneider the previous circumstances of his relationship with this woman, but I still wasn’t sure how that would affect things now. On his own admission it had been a limited thing, abruptly terminated by the outbreak of war almost two years ago and there was no reason to suppose it could cause problems. My own worst-case scenario was that the whole starship story was an elaborate con on Schneider’s part for no other purpose than to secure the archaeologue’s release and get the two of them offworld. There had been a previous attempt to liberate Wardani, if the camp commandant was to be believed, and part of me wondered if those mysteriously well equipped commandos hadn’t been Schneider’s last set of dupes in the bid to reunite him with his partner. If that turned out to be the case, I was going to be angry.