recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.
‘Sir,’ one of them said — possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. ‘Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.’
Sluka shook her head slowly. ‘They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?’
‘In a word, yes.’
‘Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.’ Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. ‘Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.’
‘What about the equipment?’ Sylveste said.
‘It can stay here and rust for all I care.’ The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.
‘Wait!’ Sylveste shouted. ‘Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler — there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.’
Sluka faced him again. ‘And you?’
‘I’ll stay here — finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.’
She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other — the one containing his stateroom — for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.
He looked around to see who was still with him.
There was Pascale — but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.
Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. ‘Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.’ He addressed another pair. ‘Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.’
‘What are you planning now?’ Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.
‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ Sylveste said. ‘I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.’
The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.
‘Morning, Case.’
The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.
‘Hey, you look great,’ he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. ‘Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?’
‘It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.’
‘I was joking,’ Ng said. ‘You look like shit warmed over.’
She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. ‘I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.’
‘Excuses.’ Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.
The voice rasped again, ‘Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.’
‘Off my back, Case.’
‘Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?’
Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
‘I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.’
Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; elite company indeed.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Under the Monument, plaza level eight, west annexe, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing?’
‘Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?’
Ng’s form nodded behind her. ‘Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.’
And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.
Soon, she was ready.
She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. ‘Monument to the Eighty,’ Khouri said.
Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker — assisted by the servitor — had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta Stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light-years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language.
