“Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?”

I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.

“So then,” he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, “you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first come, first served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.”

“For a percentage.”

“Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.”

“How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist.”

He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot’s Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.

I shrugged. “Nice work. And?”

“I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—”

“Scratchers?”