Schneider blinked. “Yeah. What about it?”

“This isn’t my planet,” I said patiently, “I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?”

“Oh. You know, kids.” He gestured, perplexed. “Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.”

“Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?”

“What?” he blinked again.

“Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?”

Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.

“They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.”

“Or turn up too late to get a better stake.”

“Yeah.” For some reason he didn’t like that crack either. “Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something.”

“Found what?”

“A Martian starship.” Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. “Intact.”

“Crap.”

“Yes, we did.”

I sighed again. “You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn’t got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?”

Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

“I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we, found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.”

“A gate?” Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. “You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?”

“Kovacs, it’s a gate.” Schneider spoke as if to a small child. “We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.”