Schneider skinned me a tight grin. “You don’t think we could have handled selling to the corporates?”
“I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on who you were dealing with.”
“So who would you have gone to?”
I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. “That’s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well,” I offered him a small smile of my own. “I’m still listening. What happened next?”
Schneider’s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.
“What happened?” He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans’ gazes were snagged back to the performance. “What happened? This war is what fucking happened.”
CHAPTER THREE
Somewhere, a baby was crying.
For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I’d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren’t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.
“Hot here.”
Schneider had shut down the shuttle’s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer waited to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle’s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.