Woken Furies

NINE

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

“Look,” said the scorpion gun reasonably. “There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang.

A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty metres below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.

“Leave us alone,” it repeated. “And we’ll do you the same favour.”

“Can’t do that.” Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. “You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.”

“Yeah.” Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. “And besides which, we want the fucking land.”

“The essence of empowerment,” said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, “is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonwealth economic constitution…”

“You are the aggressors here.” The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. “We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.”

Kiyoka snorted. “Oh, come off it.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” rumbled Orr.

It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems, and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge.

Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.

So, after a fashion, had I.

“…those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic …”

Drone’s the right flicking word.

I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards—there was, for example no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves—but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.

“…in a struggle that has surfaced again and again in every place the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—”

Movement.

Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength—Sylvie had estimated the coop’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.

“Then you leave me no choice,” it said. “I shall be forced to neutralise your incursion with immediate effect.”

“Yeah,” said Lazlo through a yawn. “You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.”

“I am already about it.”

Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley towards us, heat-seeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted.

The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-metre drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.

Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared.

Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were—came equipped with gekkogene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could—assuming I actually fucking wanted to—scramble up a hundred metres of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly-tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain.

Jadwiga, re-sleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an ear-splitting whoop as she discovered the genentech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.

Personally, I don’t like heights.

On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.

I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew.

Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it—they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographies and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.

The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked up vision. Still a kilometre off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line of sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earnt the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.

I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig.

“Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.”

“Take it easy, Micky,” she drawled back. “I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation either. Programmed parameters. Remember that.”

A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background.

On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.

Sylvie sighed. “So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement?

All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armour, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November 17th Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?”

“Who the fuck cares?” echoed Jadwiga.

“We would have,” I pointed out. “If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.”

It was unfair—if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

“Correct!” she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centres in the brain spewing an analogue of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio- phone link. “Correct your flicking parameters.”

The shell hit.

Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then—nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshalled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

“…our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has …”

Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake, and called me a liar.

A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.

“Here we go, people.” A sharp whisper, for Jadwiga’s and my benefit.

The rest would already know, advised on the internal net in less time than it takes to form a conscious human thought. “Through the primary baffles. Move on my command.”

The self-propelled gun was past the little huddle of prefabs now. Lazlo and Kiyoka had taken up positions close to the river not two kilometres downstream of the base. The karakuri advance guard had to be almost on top of them by now. The undergrowth and long silver grass along the valley twitched in a dozen places with their passing. The rest kept pace with the bigger machines.

“Now!”

Fire bloomed, pale and sudden amidst the trees downstream. Orr, cutting loose against the first of the mech puppets.

“Go! Go!”

The lead spider tank staggered slightly in the water. I was already moving, a route down the rock I’d mapped out a couple of dozen times while I was waiting under the overhang. Cascading seconds, the Eishundo sleeve took over and put my hands and feet in place with engineered poise.

I jumped the last two metres and hit the scree slope. An ankle tried to turn on the uneven footing—emergency sinew servos yanked taut and stopped it. I stood and sprinted.

A spider turret swivelled. The scree shattered into shale where I’d been.

Splinters stung the back of my head and ripped into my cheek.

“Hey!”

“Sorry.” The strain was in her voice like unshed tears. “On it.”

The next shot went way over my head, maybe homing in on some seconds-decayed image of my scramble down the rock face that she’d stabbed into the sighting software, maybe just a blind shot in the machine equivalent of panic. I snarled relief, drew the Ronin shard blaster from the sheath on my back and closed with the mimints.

Whatever Sylvie had done to the co-op’s systems was brutally effective.

The spider tanks were swaying drunkenly, loosing fire at random into the sky and the upper crags of the valley’s sides. Around them, karakuri ran about like rats on a sinking raft. The scorpion gun stood in the midst of it all, apparently immobilised, low on its haunches.

I reached the gun in under a minute, pushing the sleeve’s biotech to its anaerobic limits. Fifteen metres off, a semi-functional karakuri stumbled into my path, upper arms waving confusedly. I shot it left-handed with the Ronin, heard the soft cough of the blast and saw the storm of monomolecular fragments rip it apart. The shard gun clanked another round into the chamber. Against the small mimints, it was a devastating weapon, but the scorpion gun was heavily armoured and its internal systems would be hard to damage with directional fire.

I got up close, slapped the ultravibe mine against one towering metal flank, then tried to get out of the way before it blew.

And something went wrong.

The scorpion gun lurched sideways. Weapons systems on its spine woke to sudden life and swivelled. One massive leg flexed and kicked out.

Intended or not, the blow grazed my shoulder, numbed the arm below it and dumped me full length into the long grass. I lost the shard blaster from fingers gone abruptly nerveless.

“Fuck.”

The gun moved again. I got to my knees, saw peripheral movement.

High up on the carapace, a secondary turret was trying to bring its machine guns to bear on me. I spotted the blaster lying in the grass and dived after it. Combat custom chemicals squirted in my muscles and feeling fizzed back down the numbed arm. Above me on the self-propelled weapon’s bodywork, the machine rifle turret triggered and slugs ripped the grass apart. I grabbed up the blaster and rolled frantically back towards the scorpion gun, trying to get under the angle of fire. The machine-rifle storm tracked me, showering ripped-up earth and shredded undergrowth.

I shielded my eyes with one arm, threw up the Ronin right-handed and fired blind at the sound of the guns. Combat conditioning must have put the shot somewhere close—the hail of slugs choked off.

And the ultravibe mine came to life.

It was like a swarm of autumn fire beetles in feeding frenzy, amplified for some bug’s-eye experia documentary. A shrilling, chittering explosion of sound as the bomb shattered molecular bonds and turned a metre-broad sphere of armoured machinery into iron filings. Metallic dust fountained out of the breach where I’d slapped the mine. I scrabbled backwards along the scorpion gun’s flank, unstrapping a second bomb from the bandolier.

They’re not much bigger than the ramen bowls they very closely resemble, but if you get caught in the blast radius, you’re paste.

The scream of the first mine cut off as its field collapsed inward and it turned itself to dust. Smoke boiled out of the massive gash it had left. I snapped the fuse on the new mine and pitched it into the hole. The gun’s legs flexed and stamped, uncomfortably close to where I was crouched, but it looked spasmodic. The mimint seemed to have lost directional sense of where the attack was coming from.

“Hey, Micky.” Jadwiga, on the covert channel, sounding a little puzzled. “You need any help there?”

“Don’t think so. You?”

“Nah, just you should see—” I lost the rest in the shriek as the new mine cut in. The breached hull vomited fresh dust and violet electrical discharge.

Across the general channel the scorpion gun began a high-pitched electronic weeping, as the ultravibe chewed deeper into its guts. I felt every hair on my body rise at the sound.

In the background, someone was shouting. Sounded like Orr.

Something blew in the scorpion gun’s innards, and it must have knocked out the mine because the cluttering insect scream shut off almost the same instant. The weeping died away like blood soaking into parched earth.

“Say again?”

“I said,” yelled Orr, “command head down. Repeat, Sylvie is down. Get the fuck out of there.”

Sense of something massive tumbling—

“Easier said than done, Orr.” There was a tight, high-tension grin in Jad’s voice. “We’re a little fucking pressed right now.”

“Seconded,” gritted Lazlo. He was using the audio link—Sylvie’s collapse must have taken out the crew net. “Get the heavy ordnance up here, big man. We could use—”

Kiyoka broke in. “Jad, you just hang—”

Something flashed at the corner of my vision. I whipped about just as the karakuri came at me with all eight arms crooked to grab. No confused lurching to it this time, the mech puppet was up and running at capacity. I got my head out of the way just in time to miss a scything upper limb and pulled the shard blaster’s trigger point blank. The shot blew the karakuri backward in pieces, lower section shredded. I shot the upper half again to make sure, then swung about and skirted the dead bulk of the scorpion gun, Ronin cradled tight in both hands.

“Jad, where are you?”

“In the fucking river.” Short, crunching explosions behind her voice on the link. “Look for the downed tank and the million fucking karakuri that want it back.”

I ran.

I killed four more karakuri on the way to the river, all of them far too fast moving to be corrupted. Whatever had floored Sylvie hadn’t left her time to finish the intrusion run.

On the audio link, Lazlo yelped and cursed. It sounded like damage.

Jadwiga shouted a steady stream of obscenities at the mimints, counterpoint for the flat reports of her shard blaster.

I winced past the tumbling wreckage of the last mech puppet and sprinted flat out for the bank. At the edge, I jumped. Drenching impact of icy water splashed to groin height and suddenly the swirling sound of the river. Mossed stones underfoot and a sensation like hot sweat in my feet as the genentech spines tried instinctively to grip inside my boots. Grab after balance. I nearly went over, didn’t quite. Flexed like a tree in a high wind, beat my own momentum barely and stayed upright, knee deep. I scanned for the tank.

Near the other bank, I found it, collapsed in what looked like about a metre of fast-flowing water. Cranked up vision gave me Jadwiga and Lazlo huddled in the lee of the wreck, karakuri crawling on the riverbank, but seemingly not keen to trust themselves to the current the river was running. A couple had jumped to the tank’s hull, but didn’t seem able to get much purchase. Jadwiga was firing at them one-handed, almost at random. Her other arm was wrapped around Lazlo. There was blood on both of them.

The range was a hundred metres—too far for effective shooting with the shard blaster. I ploughed into the river until it reached chest height and was still too far off. The current tried to knock me down.

“Motherfucking—”

I kicked off and swam awkwardly, Ronin held to my chest with one arm.

Instantly, the current started tugging me away downstream.

“Fuuuck—”

The water was freezing, crushing my lungs closed against the need to breathe, numbing the skin on face and hands. The current felt like a living thing, yanking insistently at my legs and shoulders as I thrashed about.

The weight of the shard blaster and the bandolier of ultravibe mines tried to drag me under.

Did drag me under.

I flailed to the surface of the water, sucked for air, got half and half, went under again.

Get a grip, Kovacs.

Think.

Get a fucking GRIP.

I kicked for the surface, forced myself up and filled my lungs. Took a bearing on the rapidly receding wreck of the spider tank. Then I let myself be dragged down, reached for the bottom and grabbed hold.

The spines gripped. I found purchase with my feet as well, braced myself against the current and started to crawl across the river bed.

It took longer than I’d have liked.

In places the stones I chose were too small or too poorly embedded and they ripped loose. In other places, my boots couldn’t gouge enough purchase. I gave up seconds and metres of ground each time, flailed back again. Once I nearly lost the shard blaster. And anaerobic enhancement or not, I had to come up every three or four minutes for air.

But I made it.

After what seemed like an eternity of grabbing and rooting around in the stabbing, cramping cold, I stood up in waist-high water, staggered to the bank and hauled myself panting and shaking out of the river. For a couple of moments, it was all I could do to kneel there, coughing.

Rising machine hum.

I staggered to my feet, trying to hold the shard blaster somewhere close to still in both trembling hands. My teeth were chattering as if something had short circuited in my jaw muscles.

“Micky.”

Orr, seated astride one of the bugs, a long-barrelled Ronin of his own in one raised hand. Stripped to the waist, blast discharge vents still not fully

HP' " ' "tP? closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonised dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.

He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.

“Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.”

“I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—”

He nodded. “Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.”

“And sssssSylvie?”

He looked away.

TEN

“How is she?”

Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.

“Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.”

A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colours and motion. Recognisable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.

“That’s the command software?”

“Yeah.” Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright grey raged around her fingertip. “This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.”

I looked at the multicoloured tangle. “Lot of activity.”

“Yeah, far too much. Post run, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.” She shrugged again. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.

“What went wrong out there today, Ki?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an anti-viral that already knew our intrusion systems.”

“In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.”

“I know.”

“They say the stuff is evolving.” Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone.

Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. “Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—”

Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. “Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?”

“—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.” Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil.

“That’s black clinic software in there, and it’s going to eat Sylvie’s mind if we don’t find a blueprint for it. And that’s bad news, because the original architects are all back in fucking Millsport.”

“And that,” shouted Kiyoka, “is fucking bullshit.”

“Boy!” To my amazement, they both shut up and looked at me. “Uh, look. Las. I don’t see how even evolved software is going to map onto our particular systems just like that. I mean, what are the odds?”

“Because it’s the same people, Mick. Come on. Who writes the stuff for deCom? Who designed the whole deCom programme? And who’s buried to the fucking balls in developing secret black nanotech? The fucking Mecsek administration, that’s who.” Lazlo spread his hands, gave me a world-weary look. “You know how many reports there are, how many people I know, I’ve talked to, who’ve seen mimints there are no fucking archive descriptors for? This whole continent’s an experiment, man, and we’re just a little part of it. And the skipper there just got dumped in the rat’s maze.”

More movement at the door—Orr and Jadwiga, come to see what all the shouting was about. The giant shook his head.

“Las, you really got to buy yourself that turtle farm down in Newpest you’re always talking about. Go barricade yourself in there and talk to the eggs.”

“Fuck you, Orr.”

“No, fuck you, Las. This is serious.”

“She no better, Ki?” Jadwiga crossed to the monitor and dropped a hand on Kiyoka’s shoulder. Like mine, her new sleeve was grown on a standard Harlan’s World chassis. Mingled Slavic and Japanese ancestry made for savagely beautiful cheekbones, epicanthic folds to the pale jade eyes and a wide slash of a mouth. Combat biotech requirements hauled the body towards long-limbed and muscular, but the original gene stock brought it out at a curiously delicate ranginess. Skin tone was brown, faded out with tank pallor and five weeks of miserable New Hok weather.

Watching her cross the room was almost like walking past a mirror. We could have been brother and sister. Physically, we were brother and sister—the clone bank in the bunker ran to five different modules, a dozen sleeves grown off the same genetic stem in each. It had turned out easiest for Sylvie to hotwire only the one module.

Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with re-sleeves. The pheromonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.

“She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.” Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. “I just don’t know what’s going on in there.”

Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of colour in the coil.

“Ki.” I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister.

I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. “Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?”

“What?” Orr, predictably.

Kiyoka looked unhappy. “I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—”

“You are not fucking taking her hair.”

I got up from the bed and faced the giant. “And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?”

“You shut your fucking m—”

“Orr, he’s got a point.” Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. “If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op, and her own anti-virals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?”

Lazlo nodded vigorously. “Might be her only hope, man.”

“She’s been like this before,” said Orr stubbornly. “That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up fine.”

I saw the look swoop among them. No. Not fine exactly.

“If I induce the decoupler,” said Kiyoka slowly, “I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever—she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.”

“Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.” Orr glared around at us. “She’s a nicking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.”

“Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.” I turned back to the bed. “Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?”

“Yeah, it’s security-buffered.”

“And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but …”

“Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?”

Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. “I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.”

“Then—”

“Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.” Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. “Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?”

“That’s not really the issue here,” I said mildly. “All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—”

He swayed towards me. “You’re talking about fucking killing her.”

Jadwiga pushed him back. “He’s talking about saving her, Orr.”

“And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up? Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?”

I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. “Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.”

“We can’t do it anyway, Mick.” Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again.

“If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.”

You could kill this sleeve, anyway, I didn’t say. Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—

I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.

Maybe Orr was right.

“One thing’s sure,” said Jadwiga sombrely. “We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.”

More silence, while the idea settled in.

“Can she be moved?” I asked.

Kiyoka made a face. “She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,” muttered Lazlo. “It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route. I know it’s a risk.”

A slow nod from Jadwiga. “But probably worth it.”

“Going to be the whole night,” said Lazlo. “You got any meth?”

“Is Mitzi Harlan straight?”

She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to businesslike clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.

“You don’t fucking touch her,” he warned me.

From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old

Alain Marriott experia flics like Polar Quarry and The Deep Chase. It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.

Mostly.

But with skill you could feel out the whisper of local net traffic between the members of a crew, the flickering traces of electronic activity that the deComs carried with them like the scent of cigarettes on a smoker’s clothes. With more skill, you could tell the difference between these and mimint spoor and, with the right scrambler codes, you could open communication.

It took until just before dawn, but in the end, Jad and Lazlo managed to get a line on three other deCom crews working the Uncleared between our position and the Drava beachhead. Coded needlecasts sang back and forth, establishing identity and clearance, and Jadwiga sat back with a broad tetrameth grin on her face.

“Nice to have friends,” she said to me.

Once briefed, all three crews agreed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to provide cover for our retreat within their own operational range. It was pretty much an unwritten rule of deCom conduct in the Uncleared to offer that much succour—you never knew when it might be you—but the competitive standoffishness of the trade made for grudging adherence. The positions of the first two crews forced us into a long, crooked path of withdrawal and both were grumpily unwilling to move either to meet us or to provide escort south. With the third we got lucky.

Oishii Eminescu was camped two hundred and fifty kilometres north west of Drava with nine heavily armed and equipped colleagues. He offered immediately to move up and fetch us from the previous crew’s cover radius, and then to bring us all the way back to the beachhead.

“Truth is,” he told me, as we stood at the centre of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, “we can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it ‘til it breaks.”

“Seems overly rational.”

He laughed. “You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.”

“I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.”

“Yeah, that’s the song.” A wry grimace. “They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?”

I stared at the darkening horizon. “I don’t know.”

“Got to think past that stuff, sam. Got to. It’ll kill you if you don’t.”

On the other side of one of the bubblefabs, someone went past in the thickening gloom and called something out in Stripjap. Oishii grinned and yelled back. Laughter rattled back and forth. Behind us, I caught the scent of woodsmoke as someone kindled a fire. It was a standard deCom camp temporary‘fabs blown and hardened from stock that would dissolve down just as rapidly as soon as it was time to move on. Barring occasional stopovers in abandoned buildings like the Quellist listening post, I’d been living in similar circumstances with Sylvie’s crew for most of the last five weeks. Still, there was a relaxed warmth around Oishii Eminescu that was at odds with most of the deComs I’d run into so far. A lack of the usual racing-dog edginess.

“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.

“Oh, a while. While longer than I’d like, but—”

A shrug. I nodded.

“But it pays. Right?”

He grinned sourly. “Right. I’ve got a younger brother studying Martian artefact tech in Millsport, parents both coming up on needing re-sleeves they can’t afford. Way the economy’s going right now, nothing else I could do would pay enough to cover the outlay. And the way Mecsek’s butchered the education charter and the sleeve pension system, these days, you don’t pay, you don’t get.”

“Yeah, they’ve really fucked things up since I was last here.”

“Been away, huh?” He didn’t push the point the way Plex had. Old-style Harlan’s World courtesy—if I wanted to tell him I’d been doing time in storage, he probably figured I’d get round to it. And if I didn’t, well then, what business was it of his anyway.

“Yeah, about thirty, forty years. Lot of changes.”

Another shrug. “Been coming for longer than that. Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened. Mecsek’s just the late stage bad news.”

“This enemy you cannot kill,” I murmured.

He nodded and finished the quote for me. “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.”

“So I guess someone’s not been watching the waves very carefully.”

“That isn’t it, Micky.” He was looking away towards the failing light in the west, arms folded. “Times have changed since she was around, that’s all. What’s the point of toppling a First Families regime, here or anywhere else, if the Protectorate are just going to come in and unload the Envoys on you for your trouble?”

“You got a point there.”

He grinned again, more real humour in it this time. “Sam, it’s not a point. It’s the point. It’s the single big difference between then and now. If the Envoy Corps had existed back in the Unsettlement, Quellism would have lasted about six months. You can’t fight those fuckers.”

“They lost at Innenin.”

“Yeah, and how often have they lost since? Innenin was a minor glitch, a blip on the scope, strictly.”

Memory roared briefly down on me. Jimmy de Soto screaming and clawing at the ruins of his face with fingers that have already scooped out one eye and look like getting the other if I don’t …

I locked it down.

Minor glitch. Blip on the scope.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“Maybe I am,” he agreed quietly.

We stood for a while in silence after that, watching the dark arrive. The sky had cleared enough to show a waning Daikoku spiked on mountains to the north and a full but distant Marikanon like a copper coin thrown high over our heads. Swollen Hotei still lay below the horizon to the west.

Behind us, the fire settled in. Our shadows shaded into solidity amidst flickering red glow.

When it started to get too hot to stand there comfortably, Oishii offered a mannered excuse and drifted away. I endured the heat across my back for another minute after he’d gone, then turned and stared blink-eyed into the flames. A couple of Oishii’s crew crouched on the far side of the fire, warming their hands. Rippling, indistinct figures in the heated air and darkness. Low tones of conversation. Neither of them looked at me. Hard to tell if that was old-style courtesy like Oishii’s or just the usual deCom cliquishness.

What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?

Always the easy questions.

I left the fire and picked my way through the bubblefabs to where we’d pitched three of our own, diplomatically separate from Oishii’s. Smooth cold on my face and hands as my skin noticed the sudden lack of warmth.

Moonglow on the ‘fabs made them look like breaching bottlebacks in a sea of grass. When I reached the one where Sylvie was bedded down, I noticed brighter light splintering out around the closed flap. The others were in darkness. Alongside, two bugs leaned at canted angles on their parking racks, steering gear and weapon stands branching against the sky. The third was gone.

I touched the chime patch, pulled open the flap and went in. On one side of the interior, Jadwiga and Kiyoka sprang hastily apart on a tangle of bedding. Opposite them, beside a muffled illuminum night-lamp, Sylvie lay corpselike in her sleeping bag, hair combed carefully back from her face. A portable heater glowed at her feet. There was no one else in the ‘fab.

“Where’s Orr?”

“Not here.” Jad rearranged her clothing crossly. “You might have fucking knocked, Micky.”

“I did.”

“Okay, you might have fucking knocked and waited, then.”

“Sorry, it’s not what I was expecting. So where’s Orr?”

Kiyoka waved an arm. “Gone on the bug with Lazlo. They volunteered for perimeter watch. Got to show willing, we figured. These people are going to carry us home tomorrow.”

“So why don’t you guys use one of the other ‘fabs?”

Jadwiga looked across to Sylvie. “Because someone’s got to keep watch in here too,” she said softly.

“I’ll do it.”

They both looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then at each other.

Then Kiyoka shook her head.

“Can’t. Orr’d fucking kill us.”

“Orr isn’t here.”

Another exchange of glances. Jad shrugged.

“Yeah, fuck it, why not.” She stood up. “C’mon, Ki. Watch won’t change for another four hours. Orr’s not going to be any the wiser.”

Kiyoka hesitated. She leaned over Sylvie and put a hand on her forehead.

“Alright, but if anything—”

“Yeah, I’ll call you. Go on, get out of here.”

“Yeah, Ki—come on.” Jadwiga chivvied the other woman to the doorflap.

As they were stepping out she paused and grinned back at me. “And Micky. I’ve seen the way you look at her. No peeking and prodding, eh? No squeezing the fruit. Keep your fingers out of pies that don’t belong to you.”

I grinned back. “Fuck you, Jad.”

“Yeah, you wish. In your dreams, man.”

Kiyoka mouthed a more conventional thanks, and they were gone. I sat down beside Sylvie and stared at her in silence. After a couple of moments, I reached out and stroked her brow in an echo of Kiyoka’s gesture. She didn’t move. Her skin was hot and papery dry.

“Come on, Sylvie. Pull out of there.”

No response.

I took back my hand and stared at the woman some more.

What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?

She’s not Sarah. Sarah’s gone. What the fuck are you—

Oh, shut up.

It’s not like I had another choice, is it?

Recall of the final moments in Tokyo Crow came and demolished that one. The safety of the table with Plex, the warm anonymity and the promise of a ticket out tomorrow, I remembered standing up and walking away from it all, as if in answer to a siren song. Into the blood and fury of the fight.

In retrospect it was a moment so hinged, so loaded with implications of shifting fate, that it should have creaked at me as I moved to step through it.

But in retrospect they always are.

Got to say, Mick, I like you. Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows. Can’t. Put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.

That’s nice.

But it’s not enough.

My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve, it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.

Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. A half dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament microjacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others—precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.

The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel.

I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.

I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.

Is this enough? Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.

I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.

Is this—

A hand closed on my arm.

The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.

“You,” she said in Japanese, and coughed. “Help me. Help me.”

It was not her voice.

ELEVEN

There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” muttered one of Oishii’s crew.

Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.

We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.

Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.

It wasn’t over. Not nearly.

Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been—none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.

The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.

Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full checkup.

She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?

A detached deCom shrug. Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.

The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.

Burn some of that stored credit, grinned Jadwiga. Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.

The beachhead gate juddered up for us and we passed through into the compound. In comparison to the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ‘fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.

“Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,” Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. “See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?”

Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.

“I’ll go, skipper,” offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing.

Frosted snow crunched under his feet. “Rest of you go get some coffee or something.”

“Cool,” said Jadwiga. “And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” Lazlo rolled his eyes. “Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?”

I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?”

Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head towards the centre of the camp.

“Come on then. Let’s get this over with.”

Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly-heated outer chamber of the command ‘fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets.

Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls and a corner mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots.

Our breath clouded faintly in the air.

“So what did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.

“What?”

“Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?”

A grin surfaced on his face. “Well, you know I always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.”

“Las.”

“Okay, okay.” He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. “You were there with her when she woke up, right.”

“Right.”

“What did she say to you? Really.”

I shifted round to look at him. “Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.”

“Yeah.” He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. “See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.”

“Really?” I kept my tone mild.

“Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.” He turned to meet my eyes. “You’ve lost your appetite.”

“She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.”

He shook his head. “Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now, you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.”

“I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.”

And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline. So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.

We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.

“Not going to tell me, huh?”

“There’s nothing to tell, Las.”

More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.

“Look, Micky.” Lazlo hesitated. “I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And to what do I owe this honour?”

“Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—”

The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.

“All yours. See you in the bar.”

We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.

Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ‘fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.

“Oshima’s ill?” he asked flatly.

“Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands.” Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. “Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?”

“The highlands.” Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. “Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work cleanup.”

Lazlo shrugged. “Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have—”

“You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.”

“We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.” The lie came out, Envoy smooth.

Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight—it had been a while since I’d done this. “Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.”

Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.

“You are Serendipity?”

“Yes.”

“The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?”

Tag the pressure point, go after it. “I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.”

“Yes. So I see.” Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. “Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.”

This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. “Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.”

“And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.”

“Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.”

The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.”

“But—”

“We fell back to the north east,” I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. “As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.”

“We? You were involved in that decision?”

“I was bleeding to death,” I repeated.

Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. “You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.”

“Yeah, that’s ‘cause we brought the fucking house down on them,” snapped Lazlo. “Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand to fucking hand in a tunnel on our way out.”

Again, Kurumaya favoured the wincefish with a cold stare.

“There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower level structure. If there—”

“If? Fucking if?”

“—were mimints as you claim, they would have been vaporised. The two in the tunnel have been found, and seem to corroborate the story you transmitted to us once you were safely removed to the Uncleared. In the meantime, you may also be interested to know that the sweepers you left behind did encounter karakuri nests several hours later and two kilometres further west. In the ensuing suppression, there were twenty-seven deaths. Nine of them real, stack unrecovered.”

“That is a tragedy,” I said evenly. “But we would not have been able to prevent it. Had we returned with our injured and our damaged command systems, we would only have been a burden. Under the circumstances, we looked for ways to return to full operational strength as rapidly as possible instead.”

“Yes. Your report says that.”

He brooded for a few moments. I flickered another look at Lazlo, in case he was about to open his mouth again. Kurumaya’s eyes lifted to meet mine.

“Very well. You are billeted along with Eminescu’s crew for the time being. I will have a software medic examine Oshima, for which you will be billed. Allowing that her condition is stable, there will be a full investigation into the temple incident as soon as the weather clears.”

“What?” Lazlo took a step forward. “You expect us to fucking hang around here while you dig up that mess? No fucking way, man. We’re gone. Back to Tek’to on that rucking ‘loader out there.”

“Las—”

“I do not expect you to stay in Drava, no. I am ordering it. There is a command structure here, whether you like it or not. If you attempt to board the Daikoku Dawn, you will be stopped.” Kurumaya frowned. “I would prefer not to be so direct, but if you force me to, I will have you confined.”

“Confined?” For a couple of seconds, it was as if Lazlo hadn’t heard the word before and was waiting for the command head to explain it to him.

“Fucking confined? We take down five co-ops in the last month, over a dozen autonomous mimints, render safe an entire bunker full of nasty hardware, and this is the fucking thanks we get coming back in?”

Then he yelped and stumbled back, open palm jammed to one eye as if Kurumaya had just poked him in it. The command head got to his feet behind the desk. His voice was sibilant with suddenly uncapped rage.

“No. This is what happens when I can no longer trust the crews I am held responsible for.” He jerked a glance at me. “You. Serendipity. Get him out of here, and convey my instructions to the rest of your companions. I do not expect to have this conversation again. Out, both of you.”

Las was still clutching at his eye. I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him out and he angrily shrugged it away. Muttering, he lifted a trembling finger to point at Kurumaya, then seemed to think better of it and turned on his heel. He made for the door in strides.

I followed him out. At the doorway, I looked back at the command head. It was hard to read anything in the taut face, but I thought I caught a waft of it coming off him nonetheless—rage at disobedience, worse still remorse at the failure to control both situation and self. Disgust at the way things had degenerated, in the command ‘fab right here, right now, and maybe in the market free-for-all of the whole Mecsek Initiative.

Disgust, for all I knew, at the way things were sliding for the entire damned planet.

Old school.

I bought Las a drink in the bar and listened to him curse Kurumaya for a fucking stick-up-the-arse piece of shit, then went to look for the others. I left him in good company—the place was crowded with irritable deComs off the Daikoku Dawn, complaining loudly about the weather and the subsequent lockdown on deployment. Superannuated fastload jazz formed a suitably strident backdrop, mercifully shorn of the DJ dissemination I’d come to associate with it over the past month. Smoke and noise filled the bubblefab to the roof.

I found Jadwiga and Kiyoka sitting in a corner, deep in each other’s eyes and a conversation that looked a little intense to try to join. Jad told me, impatiently, that Orr had stayed with Sylvie in the accommodation ‘fab and that Oishii was around somewhere, at the bar maybe, talking to someone last time she, anyway somewhere over in the direction of her vaguely waving arm. I took the multiple hints and left the two of them to it.

Oishii wasn’t really in the direction Jadwiga had pointed, but he was at the bar and he was talking to a couple of other deComs, only one of whom I recognised as being on his crew. He welcomed me with a grin and a lifted glass. Voice pitched over the noise.

“Get a grilling, did you?”

“Something like that.” I lifted my hand to get attention behind the bar. “I get the impression Sylvie’s Slipins have been pushing the line for a while now. You want a refill?”

Oishii looked judiciously at the level of his drink. “No, I’m okay. Pushing the line, you could say that. Not the most community-minded crew around, for sure. Still, they top the boards a lot of the time. You can live on that for a while, even with a guy like Kurumaya.”

“Nice to have a reputation.”

“Yeah, which reminds me. There’s someone looking for you.”

“Oh?” He was looking into my eyes as he told me. I quelled reaction and raised an eyebrow to go with the elaborately casual interest in my voice.

Ordered a Millsport single malt from the barman and turned back to Oishii. “You get a name?”

“Wasn’t me that spoke to him.” The command head nodded at his non-crew companion. “This is Simi, lead wince for the Interruptors. Simi, that guy was asking around about Sylvie and her new recruit, you get a name?”

Simi squinted sideways for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared and he snapped his fingers.

“Yeah, got it. Kovacs. Said his name was Kovacs.”

TWELVE

Everything seemed to stop.

It was as if all the noise in the bar had abruptly frozen to arctic sludge in my ears. The smoke stopped moving, the pressure of the people behind me at the bar seemed to recede. It was a shock reaction I hadn’t had from the Eishundo sleeve, even when locked in combat with the mimints. Across the dreamy quiet of the moment, I saw Oishii watching me intently, and I lifted the glass to my lips on autopilot. The single malt went down, burning, and as the warmth hit the pit of my stomach the world started up again just as suddenly as it had stopped. Music, noise, the shifting crush of people around me.

“Kovacs,” I said. “Really?”

“You know him?” asked Simi.

“Heard of him.” There wasn’t much point in going for the deep lie. Not with the way Oishii was watching my face. I sipped at my drink again. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Nah,” Simi shook his head, clearly not that interested. “He was just asking where you were, if you’d gone out with the Slipins. Was a couple of days back, so I told him, yeah, you were all out in the Uncleared. He—”

“Did he—” I stopped myself. ”Sorry, you were saying?”

“He seemed pretty concerned to talk to you. Persuaded someone, think it was Anton and the Skull Gang, to take him out into the Uncleared for a look. So you know this guy, right? He a problem for you?”

“Of course,” said Oishii quietly. “Might not be the same Kovacs you know. It’s a common enough name.”

“There’s that,” I admitted.

“But you don’t think so?”

I manufactured a shrug. “Seems unlikely. He’s looking for me, I’ve heard of him. Most probable thing is, we’ve got some shared history.”

Oishii’s crew colleague and Simi both nodded dismissive, boozed-up assent. Oishii himself seemed more closely intrigued.

“And what have you heard about him, this Kovacs?”

This time the shrug was easier. “Nothing good.”

“Yeah,” Simi agreed sweepingly. “That’s right. Seemed like a real hardassed psycho motherfucker to me.”

“Did he come alone?” I asked.

“Nah, whole squad of enforcer types with him. ”Bout four, five of them. Millsport accents.”

Oh good. So this wasn’t a local matter any more. Tanaseda was living up to his promise. A global writ for your capture. And from somewhere they’d dug up—

You don’t know that. Not yet.

Oh, come on. It has to be. Why use the name? Whose sense of humour does that sound like to you?

Unless—

“Simi, listen. He didn’t ask for me by name, did he?”

Simi blinked at me. “Dunno, what is your name?”

“Okay. Never mind.”

“Guy was asking after Sylvie,” explained Oishii. “Her name, he knew. Knew the Slipins, seems like. But he really seemed interested in some new recruit Sylvie might have had in her team. And that name, he didn’t know. Right, Simi?”

“ ‘S about it, yeah.” Simi peered into his empty glass. I signalled the barman and got refills all round.

“So. These Millsport types. Any of them still around, you reckon?”

Simi pursed his lips. “Could be. Don’t know, I didn’t see the Skull Gang go out, don’t know how much extra weight they were carrying.”

“But it’d make sense,” said Oishii softly. “If this Kovacs did his research, he’ll know how hard it is to track movement in the Uncleared. It’d make sense to leave a couple of guys behind in case you came back.” He paused, watching my face. “And to needlecast the news if you did.”

“Yeah.” I drained my glass and shivered slightly. Got up. “Think I need to talk to my crew-mates. If you gentlemen will excuse me.”

I shouldered my way back through the crowd until I reached Jadwiga and Kiyoka’s corner again. They’d wrapped each other up in a passionate mouth-to-mouth embrace, oblivious to their surroundings. I slid into the seat next to them and tapped Jadwiga on the shoulder.

“Stop that, you two. We’ve got problems.”

“Well,” rumbled Orr. “I think you’re full of shit.”

“Really?” I kept a grip on my temper with an effort, and wished I’d just gone for full Envoy-effect persuasion, instead of trusting my deCom colleagues with the use of their own decision-making faculties. “This is the yakuza we’re talking about.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Do the math. Six weeks ago we were collectively responsible for the death of a high-ranking yakuza’s son and his two enforcers. And now there’s someone looking for us.”

“No. There’s someone looking for you. Whether he’s looking for the rest of us remains to be seen.”

“Listen. All of you.” Inclusive glance around the windowless billet they’d found for Sylvie. Spartan single berth, integral storage lockers in the walls, a chair in one corner. With the command head curled up on the bunk and her crew stood around, it was a tense, cramped space. “They know Sylvie, they’ve tied her to me. Oishii’s pal said as much.”

“Man, we wiped that room cleaner than—”

“I know, Jad, but it wasn’t enough. They got witnesses who saw the two of us, peripheral video maybe, maybe something else. The point is I know this Kovacs, and believe me, if we wait around for him to catch up with us, you’re going to find out that it doesn’t much matter whether he’s looking for me, or Sylvie, or both of us. The man is an ex-Envoy. He’ll take down everybody in this room, just to keep it simple.”

That old Envoy terror—Sylvie was asleep, out on recuperative chemicals and sheer exhaustion, and Orr was too fired up with confrontation, but the rest of them flinched. Beneath the armoured deCom cool, they’d grown up on the horror stories from Adoracion and Sharya, just like everybody else. The Envoys came and they tore your world apart. It wasn’t that simple, of course; the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

“What about we spike this ahead of time?” wondered Jadwiga. “Find Kovacs’ holdout buddies in the beachhead and shut them down before they can transmit out.”

“Probably too late, Jad.” Lazlo shook his head. “We’ve been in a couple of hours. Anybody who wants to knows about it by now.”

Gathering momentum. I stayed silent and watched it roll the way I wanted. Kiyoka weighed in, frowning.

“Anyway, we got no way to find these fuckers. Millsport accents and hard faces are plankton standard around here. At a minimum, we’d need to case the beachhead datastack and,” she indicated Sylvie’s foetal form, “we’re in no position to do that.”

“Even with Sylvie online, we’d be pushed,” said Lazlo gloomily. “Way Kurumaya feels about us right now, he’ll jump if we clean our teeth at the wrong voltage. I suppose that thing’s intrusion-proofed.”

He nodded at the personal space resonance scrambler perched on the chair. Kiyoka nodded back, slightly wearily I thought.

“State of the art, Las. Really. Picked it up in Reiko’s Straight-to-Street before we shipped out. Micky, the point is, we’re under virtual lockdown here. You say this Kovacs is coming for us, what do you suggest we do?”

Here we go.

“I suggest I get out of here tonight on the Daikoku Dawn, and I suggest I take Sylvie with me.”

Quiet rocked the room. I tracked glances, gauged emotion, estimated where this was going.

Orr rolled his head on his neck, like a freak fighter warming up.

“You,” he said deliberately, “can go fuck yourself.”

“Orr—” said Kiyoka.

“No fucking way, Ki. No fucking way does he take her anywhere. Not on my watch.”

Jadwiga looked at me narrowly. “What about the rest of us, Micky? What are we supposed to do when Kovacs turns up looking for blood?”

“Hide.” I told her. “Pull some favours, get yourselves out of sight either somewhere in the beachhead or out in the Uncleared with someone else’s crew if you can persuade them. Shit, you could even get Kurumaya to arrest you, if you trust him to keep you locked up safe.”

“Hey, fuckhead, we can do all of that without handing Sylvie over to y—”

“Can you, Orr?” I locked gazes with the giant. “Can you? Can you wade back out into the Uncleared with Sylvie the way she is now? Who’s going to carry her out there? What crew? What crew can afford the dead weight?”

“He’s right, Orr.” Lazlo shrugged. “Even Oishii isn’t going to go back out there with that on his back.”

Orr looked around him, eyes flickering cornered.

“We can hide her here, in the—”

“Orr, you’re not listening to me. Kovacs will tear this place apart to get to us. I know him.”

“Kurumaya—”

“Forget it. He’ll go through Kurumaya like angelfire, if that’s what it takes. Orr, there’s only one single thing that’ll stop him, and that’s knowing that Sylvie and I are gone. Because then he won’t have time to piss about looking for the rest of you. When we arrive in Tek’to, we make sure the news gets back to Kurumaya and by the time Kovacs is here, it’ll be common knowledge around the beachhead that we skipped. That’ll be enough to kick him out of here on the next loader.”

More quiet, this time like something counting down. I watched them buy in, one by one.

“Makes sense, Orr.” Kiyoka clapped the giant on the shoulder. “It isn’t pretty, but it scans.”

“At least this way, the skipper’s out of the firing line.”

Orr shook himself. “I don’t fucking believe you people. Can’t you see he’s trying to scare you all?”

“Yeah, he’s succeeding in scaring me,” snapped Lazlo. “Sylvie’s down. If the yakuza are hiring Envoy assassins, we’re severely outclassed.”

“We need to keep her safe, Orr.” Jadwiga was staring at the floor as if digging a tunnel might be a good next move. “And we can’t do it here.”

“Then I’m going too.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible,” I said quietly. “I figure Lazlo can get us in one of the life-raft launchers, the way he came aboard in Tek’to. But with the hardware you’re carrying, the power source, penetrate the hull unauthorised, you’re going to set off every leakage alarm the Daikoku Dawn has.”

It was inspired guesswork, a blind leap off the rapid scaffolding of Envoy intuition, but it seemed to hit home. The Slipins looked back and forth at each other, and finally Lazlo nodded.

“He’s right, Orr. No way can I get you up that chute quietly.”

The ordnance giant stared at me for what seemed like a long time.

Finally, he looked away, at the woman on the bed.

“If you hurt her in any way at all—”

I sighed. “The best way I know to hurt her, Orr, is to leave her here. Which I don’t plan to do. So save the attitude for Kovacs.”

“Yeah,” said Jadwiga grimly. “And this is a promise. As soon as Sylvie’s back on line, we take that motherfucker and we—”

“Admirable,” I agreed. “But a little premature. Plan your revenge later, okay? Right now let’s just all concentrate on surviving.”

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

When pressed, Lazlo admitted that security around the ‘loader ramps at Kompcho was lax verging on laughable. At the Drava beachhead, with mimint assault a constant fear, the dockside would be sewn up tight with electronic intrusion countermeasures.

“So,” I tried for patient calm. “You’ve never actually done this life-raft chute thing in Drava?”

“Well, yeah, once.” Lazlo scratched his ear. “But I had some jamming help from Suki Bajuk.”

Jadwiga snorted. “That little trollop.”

“Hey, jealous. She’s a fucking good command deCom. Even whiffed off her head, she greased the entry codes like—”

“Not all she greased that weekend, from what I hear.”

“Man, just because she isn’t—”

“Is she here?” I asked loudly. “Now, in the beachhead?”

Lazlo went back to scratching his ear. “Dunno. We could check, I guess, but—”

“It’ll take forever,” predicted Kiyoka. “And anyway, she may not be up for another code greasing, if she finds out what this is about. Helping you get your kicks is one thing, Las. Bucking Kurumaya’s lockdown might not appeal so much, you know what I mean?”

“She doesn’t have to know,” said Jadwiga.

“Don’t be a bitch, Jad. I’m not putting Suki in the firing line without—”

I cleared my throat. “What about Oishii?”

They all looked round at me. Orr’s brow furrowed. “Maybe. He and Sylvie go back to the early days. Hired on as sprogs together.”

Jadwiga grinned. “Sure he’ll do it. If Micky asks him.”

“What?”

There were grins appearing on everyone’s mouths now, it seemed.

Welcome release to the building tension. Kiyoka sniggered behind a hand pressed to her nose. Lazlo looked elaborately at the ceiling. Stifled snorts of hilarity. Only Orr was too angry to join in the fun.

“Didn’t you notice over the last couple of days, Micky?” Jadwiga, playing this one until it creaked. “Oishii likes you. I mean, he really likes you.”

I looked around the cramped room at my companions, and tried to match Orr for deadpan lack of amusement. Mostly, I was irritated at myself. I hadn’t noticed, or at least hadn’t identified the attraction for what—Jadwiga said—it was. For an Envoy, that was a serious failure to perceive exploitable benefit.

Ex-Envoy.

Yeah, thanks.

“That’s good,” I said evenly. “I’d better go talk to him, then.”

“Yeah,” Jadwiga managed, straightfaced. “See if he wants to give you a hand.”

The laughter erupted, explosive in the confined space. An unwanted grin forced its way onto my mouth.

“You motherfuckers.”

It didn’t help. The hilarity scaled upward. On the bed, Sylvie stirred and opened her eyes at the sound. She propped herself up on one elbow and coughed painfully. The laughter drained out of the room as rapidly as it had come.

“Micky?” Her voice came out weak and rusty.

I turned to the bed. Caught out of the corner of one eye the venomous glare Orr fired at me. I leaned over her.

“Yeah, Sylvie. I’m here.”

“What are you laughing for?”

I shook my head. “That’s a very good question.”

She gripped my arm with the same intensity as that night in Oishii’s encampment. I steeled myself for what she might say next. Instead, she just shivered and stared at her fingers where they sank into the arm of the jacket I was wearing.

“I,” she muttered. “It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—”

“Leave her alone, Micky.” Orr tried to shoulder me aside, but Sylvie’s grip on my arm defeated the move. She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“What’s going on?” she pleaded.

I glanced sideways at the giant.

“You want to tell her?”

THIRTEEN

Night fell across Drava in swathes of snow-chipped gloom, settling like a well worn blanket around the huddled ‘fabs of the beachhead and then the higher, angular ruins of the city itself. The microblizzard front came and went with the wind, brought the snow in thick, swirling wraps that plastered your face and got inside the neck of your clothing, then whirled away, thinning out to almost nothing, and then back again to dance in the funnelled glare of the camp’s Angier lamps. Visibility oscillated, went down to fifty metres and then cleared, went down again. It was weather for staying inside.

Crouched in the shadow of a discarded freight container at one end of the wharf, I wondered for a moment how the other Kovacs was coping, out in the Uncleared. Like me, he’d have the standard Newpest native’s dislike for the cold, like me he’d be—

You don’t know that, you don’t know that’s who he—

Yeah, right.

Look, where the fuck are the yakuza going to get hold of a spare personality copy of an ex-Envoy? And why the fuck would they take the risk? Under all that Old Earth ancestor crabshit veneer, in the end they’re just fucking criminals. There’s no way—

Yeah, right.

It’s the itch we all live with, the price of the modern age. What if? What if, at some nameless point in your life, they copy you. What if you’re stored somewhere in the belly of some machine, living out who knows what parallel virtual existence or simply asleep, waiting to be released into the real world.

Or already unleashed and out there somewhere. Living.

You see it in the experia flics, you hear the urban myths of friends of friends, the ones who through some freak machine error end up meeting themselves in virtual or, less often, reality. Or the Lazlo-style conspiracy horror stories of military-authorised multiple sleeving. You listen, and you enjoy the existential shiver it sends up your spine. Once in a very long time, you hear one you might even believe.

I’d once met and had to kill a man who was double-sleeved.

I’d once met myself, and it hadn’t ended well.

I was in no hurry to do it again.

And I had more than enough else to worry about.

Fifty metres down the dock, the Daikoku Dawn bulked dimly in the blizzard. She was a bigger vessel than the Guns for Guevara, by the look of her an old commercial ‘loader, taken out of mothballs and regeared for deCom haulage. A whiff of antique grandeur hung about her. Light gleamed cosily from portholes and clustered in colder white and red constellations on the superstructure above. Earlier, there’d been a desultory trickle of figures up the gangways as the outgoing deComs went aboard, and lights at the boarding ramps, but now the hatches were closing up and the hoverloader stood isolated in the chill of the New Hok night.

Figures through the muffling swirl of white on black to my right. I touched the hilt of the Tebbit knife and cranked up my vision.

It was Lazlo, leading with a wincefish flex in his stride and a fierce grin on his snow-chilled face. Oishii and Sylvie in tow. Chemical functionality trowelled across the woman’s features, a more intense control in the other command head’s demeanour. They crossed the open ground along the quayside and slipped into the shelter of the container. Lazlo scrubbed at his face with both hands and shook the melting snow from splayed fingers.

He’d strapped his healing arm with a combat servosplint and didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. I caught the blast of alcohol on his breath.

“Okay?”

He nodded. “Anyone who’s interested, and a few who probably weren’t, now knows Kurumaya’s got us locked down. Jad’s still in there, being loudly pissed off to anyone who’ll listen.”

“Oishii? You set?”

The command head regarded me gravely. “If you are. Like I said, you’ll have five minutes max. All I can do without leaving traces.”

“Five minutes is fine,” said Lazlo impatiently.

Everybody looked at Sylvie. She managed a wan smile under the scrutiny.

“Fine,” she echoed. “Scan up. Let’s do it.”

Oishii’s face took on the abrupt inwardness of net time. He nodded minutely to himself.

“They’re running the navigational systems at standby. Drives and systems test in two hundred and twenty seconds. You’d better be in the water by the time it kicks in.”

Sylvie scraped up some hollow-eyed professional interest and a stifled cough.

“Hull security?”

“Yeah, it’s on. But the stealth suits should throw back most of the scan. And when you get down to water level, I’m going to pass you off as a couple of ripwings waiting for easy fish in the wake turbulence. Soon as the system test cycle starts, get up that chute. I’ll vanish you on the internal scanners, and the navgear will assume it lost the rips in the wake. Same for you coming out, Lazlo. So stay in the water until she’s well down the estuary.”

“Great.”

“You get us a cabin?” I asked.

The corner of Oishii’s mouth twitched. “Of course. No luxury spared for our fugitive friends. Starboard lower are mostly empty, S37 is all yours. Just push.”

“Time to go,” hissed Lazlo. “One at a time.”

He flitted out of the cover of the container with the same accomplished wincefish lope I’d seen deployed in the Uncleared, was a moment exposed to view along the quay and then swung himself lithely off the edge of the wharf and was gone again. I glanced sideways at Sylvie and nodded.

She went, less smoothly than Lazlo, but still with an echo of the same grace. I thought I heard a faint splash this time. I gave her five seconds and followed, across the blizzard-shrouded open space, crouch to grab the top rung of the inspection ladder and down, hand over rapid hand, to the chemical stink of the estuary below. When I was immersed to the waist I let go and fell back into the water.

Even through the stealth suit and the clothes I wore over it, the shock of entry was savage. The cold stabbed through, clutched at my groin and chest and forced the air out of my lungs through gritted teeth. The gekkogrip cells in my palms flexed their filaments in sympathy. I drew in a fresh breath and cast about in the water for the others.

“Over here.”

Lazlo gestured from a corrugated section of the dock where he and Sylvie were clinging to a corroded cushioning generator. I slipped through the water towards them and let my genentech hands grip me directly to the evercrete. Lazlo breathed in jerkily and spoke through chattering teeth.

“Get ttto the stttern and tttread water between the dock and the hull. You’ll sssee the launchers. Dddddon’t dddrink the water, eh.”

We traded clenched grins and kicked off.

It was hard work, swimming against a body reflex that wanted nothing more than to curl up tight against the cold and shudder. Before we’d gone halfway, Sylvie was falling behind and we had to go back for her. Her breath was coming in harsh bursts, her teeth were gritted and her eyes were starting to roll.

“Cccan’t hold it tttogether,” she muttered as I turned in the water and Lazlo helped haul her onto my chest. “Dddon’ttt tell me we’re whu-whuwwinning, whu-winning fffucking whwhat?”

“Be okay,” I managed through my own clamped jaws. “Hold on. Las, you keep going.”

He nodded convulsively and flailed off. I struck out after him, awkward with the burden on my chest.

“Is there no other fucking choice?” she moaned, barely above a whisper.

Somehow I got us both to the rising bulk of the Daikoku Dawn’s stern where Lazlo was waiting. We paddled round into the crevice of water between the ‘loader’s hull and the dock and I slapped a hand against the evercrete wall to steady myself.

“Llless thththan a mmminute,” said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. “Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.”

The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.

“Up there,” he yelled over the engine noise.

I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chainlink inspection ladder up the loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.

The note of the engines deepened, settling down.

Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and onto the scant, down curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie towards the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top and after some maneuvering the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.

A couple of metres above me, I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him—a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found

I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum and got moving again.

At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.

“This is it.” He thumped the yielding surface above his head. “This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawlspace between levels. Just pop the nearest access, panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.”

We worked the canvasynth raft back from one edge of the hatchway and warm, stale air gusted through into the chute. I laughed with sheer involuntary pleasure at the feel of it. Lazlo nodded sourly.

“Yeah, enjoy. Some of us are going back in the fucking water now.”

Sylvie squeezed through and I was about to follow, when the wincefish tugged at my arm. I turned back. He hesitated.

“Las? Come on, man, we’re running out of time.”

“You.” He lifted a warning finger. “I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her. You keep her safe ‘til we can get to you. ‘til she’s back online.”

“Alright.”

“I’m trusting you,” he repeated.

Then he turned, unlatched his hold on the hatch and was sliding rapidly down the curve of the launcher chute. As he disappeared at the bottom, I heard a faint whoop come floating back up.

I stared after him for what seemed like far too long, then turned and forced my way irritably through the canvasynth barrier between myself and my newly acquired responsibilities.

The memory rolled back over me.

In the bubblefab—

“You. Help me. Help me!”

Her eyes pin me. Muscles of her face taut with desperation, mouth slightly open.

It’s a sight that sends a deep and unlooked-for sense of arousal bubbling through my guts. She’s thrown back the sleeping bag and leaned across to grab at me, and in the low light from the muffled illuminum lamp, under the reaching arm, I can see the slumped mounds her breasts make across her chest. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her like this—the Slipins don’t suffer from coyness and after a month of close quarters camping across the Uncleared, I could probably draw most of them naked from memory—but something about Sylvie’s face and posture is suddenly deeply sexual.

“Touch me.” The voice that is not hers rasps and prickles the hairs on my neck erect. “Tell me you’re fucking real.”

“Sylvie, you’re not—”

Her hand shifts, from my arm to my face.

“I think I know you,” she says wonderingly. “Black Brigade elect, right. Tetsu battalion. Odisej? Ogawa?”

The Japanese she’s using is archaic, centuries out of date. I fight down the ghost of a shiver and stay in Amanglic. “Sylvie, listen to me—”

“Your name’s Sylvie?” Face racked with doubt. She shifts languages to meet me.

“I don’t remember, I, it’s, I can’t—”

“Sylvie.”

“Yeah, Sylvie.”

“No,” I say through lips that feel numb. Your name’s Sylvie.”

“No.” There’s a sudden panic in her now. “My name’s. My name’s. They call me, they called me, they—”

Her voice stops up and her eyes flinch sideways, away front mine. She tries to get up out of the sleeping bag. Her elbow skids on the slick material of the lining and she slips over towards me. I put out my arms and they’re suddenly fall of her warm, tightly muscled torso. The fist I snapped closed when she spoke opens involuntarily and the cortical stacks crushed inside it spill onto the floor. My palms press against taut flesh. Her hair moves and brushes at my neck and I can smell her, warmth and female sweat welling up out of the opened sleeping bag.

Something trips again in the pit of my stomach, and maybe she can feel it too because she makes a low moaning sound into the flesh of my throat. Lower down in the confines of the bag, her legs shift around impatiently and then part for my hand as it slides down over one hip and between her thighs. I’m stroking her cunt before I realise what I’m doing, and she’s damp to the touch.

“Yes.” It gusts out of her. “Yes, that. There.”

This time when her legs shift, her whole body tilts from the hips upward and her thighs spread as wide as the sleeping bag will allow. My fingers slip into her and she makes a tight hissing noise, pulls back from the clasp on my neck and glares at me as if I’ve just stabbed her. Her fingers hook into my shoulder and upper arm. I rub long, slow ovals up inside her and feel her hips pump in protest at the deliberate pace of the motion. Her breath starts to come in shortening bursts.

“You’re real,” she mutters in between. “Oh, you’re real.”

And now her hands are moving over me, fingers tangling in the fastenings of my jacket, rubbing at my rapidly swelling crotch, gripping my face at the jaw. She seems unable to decide what to do with the body she’s touching, and slowly the realisation soaks through me that as she slides irretrievably into the crevasse of her orgasm, she’s testing the assertion coming faster and faster across her lips you’re real, you’re real, you’re fucking real, aren’t you, you’re real, oh, you’re real, yes, you fucker, yes, yes, you’re real you’re fucking real—

Her voice locks up in her throat with her breath, and her stomach flexes her almost double with the force of the climax. She twines around me like the long lethal ribbons of belaweed out beyond Hirata’s reef, thighs clenched on my hand, body folded onto and over my chest and shoulder. From somewhere I know she’s staring off that shoulder at the shadows on the far side of the bubblefab.

“My name is Nadia Makita,” she says quietly.

And again, it’s like current through my bones. Like the moment she grabbed my arm, the shock of the name. The litany kicks off in my head. It’s not possible it’s not—

I ease her loose from my shoulder, pull her back and the motion dislodges a fresh wave of pheromones. Our faces are a couple of centimetres apart.

“Micky,” I mutter. “Serendipity.”

Her head darts forward like a bird’s and her mouth fastens on mine, shutting off the words. Her tongue is hot and feverish, and her hands are working at my clothes again, this time with determined purpose. I struggle out of my jacket, unfasten the heavy canvasynth trousers and her hand is burrowing in the gap as they open. Weeks in the Uncleared with barely the privacy to masturbate, a body kept on ice for centuries, it’s all I can do to keep from coming as her hand closes around the shaft of my cock. She feels it and grins in the kiss, lips unsticking from mine, the faintest scrape of teeth on teeth and the grate of a chuckle deep in her throat. She kneels upright on the sleeping bag, balancing with one arm on my shoulder while the other stays between my legs, working. Her fingers are long and slim and hot and clammy with sweat, curling into a practised grip and pumping gently up and down. I force the trousers down past my hips and lean backward to give her space. The ball of her thumb rubs back and forth against my glans like a metronome. I groan my lungs empty and instantly she slackens the pace almost to a halt. She presses her free hand flat on my chest, pushes me towards the floor while her grip on my hard-on tightens almost to crushing. Coiled muscle in my stomach keeps me flexed upright from the floor against the pressure she’s exerting and damps down the pulsing need to come.

“Do you want to be inside me?” she asks seriously.

I shake my head. “Whatever, Sylvie. Whatever—”

A hard tug on the root of my cock. “My name is not Sylvie.”

“Nadia. Whatever.” I grasp her by one curved arse cheek, one long hard thigh and drag her forward onto me. She takes the hand from my chest, reaches down and spreads herself, then sinks slowly onto my cock. Our gasps blend at the contact.

I search inside myself somewhere for a little Envoy control, settle my hands at her hips and help her lift herself up and down. But this isn’t going to last long. She reaches for my head and draws it down to one swollen breast, presses my face into the flesh and guides me to the nipple. I suck it in and grip the other breast in one hand while she rises on her knees and rides us both to a climax that dims out my vision as it explodes through us.

We collapse onto each other in the dimly-lit bubblefab, slick with sweat and shuddering. The heater throws a reddish glow across our tangled limbs and tight pressed bodies and there’s a tiny sound in the gloom that could be this woman weeping or maybe just the wind outside, trying to find a way in.

I don’t want to look her in the face to find out which.

In the bowels of the steadily thrumming Daikoku Dawn, we levered ourselves up from the crawlspace into a corridor and made our dripping way to S3 7. As promised, the door flexed open at a push. Inside, lights sprang up in an unexpectedly luxurious space. I’d subconsciously been preparing myself for something along the lines of the spartan two-bunk accommodation we’d had on the Guns for Guevara, but Oishii had done us proud. The cabin was a well-appointed comfort class with an autoform bed space that could be programmed to swell up as twin singles or a broad double. The fixtures snowed wear but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.

“Very nice,” I chattered as I closed the door on lock. “Well done, Oishii. I approve.”

En-suite facilities were almost the size of another single cabin themselves, complete with airblast drier in the shower cabinet. We peeled naked and dumped our soaked clothing, then took turns rinsing the chill out of our bones first under a pummelling hail of hot water, then in a gently buffeting storm of warm air. It took a while, one at a time, but there was no hint of invitation in Sylvie’s face as she stepped into the cabinet and so I stayed outside rubbing at my chilled flesh. At one point, watching her as she turned with water streaming down over her breasts and belly, trickling between her legs and tugging at a tiny tuft of drenched pubic hair, I felt myself beginning to harden. I moved quickly to pick up the jacket from my stealth suit and sat awkwardly with it covering my erection.

The woman in the shower caught the movement and looked at me curiously, but she said nothing. No reason why she should. Last time I’d seen Nadia Makita, she’d been slipping into a post-coital drowse in a bubblefab out on the New Hok plains. Small, confident smile on her lips, one arm wrapped loosely around my thigh. When I finally pulled loose, she only turned over in the sleeping bag and muttered to herself.

She hadn’t been back since.

And meanwhile you dressed and tidied up before the others got back, like a criminal trying to cover his tracks.

Met Orr’s suspicious gaze with even Envoy deceit.

Slipped away with Lazlo to your own ‘fab, to lie awake until dawn, disbelieving what you’d seen and heard and done.

Finally, Sylvie stepped out of the cabinet airblasted all but dry. With an effort I stopped myself staring at the suddenly sexualised landscape of her body and went to change places with her. She said nothing, just touched me on one shoulder with a loosely curled fist and frowned. Then she disappeared into the cabin next door.

I stayed under the shower for nearly an hour, turning back and forth in water just below scalding, masturbating vaguely and trying not to think too much about what I was going to have to do when we got to Tekitomura.

The Daikoku Dawn throbbed around me as she ploughed southward.

When I got out of the shower, I dumped our soaked clothing in the cabinet and left the airblast on full, then wandered through to the cabin.

Sylvie was sleeping soundly beneath the coverlet of a bedspace she’d programmed to mould as a double.

I stood and watched her sleep for a long time. Her mouth was open and her hair was in chaotic disarray around her face. The ebony central cord had twisted so that it lay phallically across one cheek. Imagery I didn’t need. I smoothed it back with the rest of the hair until her face was clear.

She muttered in her sleep and moved the same loosely curled fist she’d punched me with up to touch her mouth. I stood and watched her some more.

She’s not.

I know she’s not. It’s not possi—

What, just like it’s not possible there’s another Takeshi Kovacs out there hunting you? Where’s your sense of wonder, Tak?

I stood and watched.

And in the end I shrugged irritably and climbed into the bedspace beside her, and tried to sleep.

It took a while.

FOURTEEN

The crossing back to Tekitomura was far faster than our trip out had been with the Guns for Guevara. Flogging steadily through the icy sea away from the New Hok coast, the Daikoku Dawn was constrained by none of the caution her sister ship had shown going in, and ran at full speed for the bulk of the voyage. According to Sylvie, we raised Tekitomura on the horizon not long after the sun came up and woke her through windows we’d forgotten to blank. Less than an hour after that we were crowding the ramps at Kompcho.

I woke to a sunlit cabin, stilled engines and Sylvie, dressed and staring at me over arms folded across the backrest of a chair she’d straddled beside the bedspace. I blinked at her.

“What?”

“What the fuck were you doing last night?”

I propped myself upright beneath the covers and yawned. “You want to expand on that a little? Give me some idea what you’re talking about?”

“What I’m talking about,” she snapped, “is waking up with your dick jammed against my spine like a racking shard blaster barrel.”

“Ah.” I rubbed at one eye. “Sorry.”

“Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?”

I shrugged. “Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?”

“Oh.” She looked away. “I don’t remember doing that.”

“Well you did.” I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was.

I nodded at what she was wearing. “Clothes are dry, I see.”

“Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.” Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, “I’ll get yours for you.”

We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed.

We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.

“We’d better get you covered up,” I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. “No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.”

She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. “I thought the idea was to leave traces.”

“Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.”

“Alright.”

The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct—a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.

“How may I help you?”

“I have vital information for you,” I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. “I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hover loader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.”

The construct smiled again. “That’s impossible, sir.”

“Yeah? Then go check out cabin S37.” I cut the call, turned off the terminal and nodded at Sylvie, who was struggling to get the last of her riotous hair stuffed inside the curtain-cloth headscarf.

“Very becoming. We’ll make a god-fearing maiden of modest demeanour out of you yet.”

“Fuck off.” The natural spring in the command head mane was still pushing the edges of the scarf forward and out. She attempted to smear the cloth backward, out of the way of her peripheral vision. “You think they’ll come here?”

“Eventually. But they’ve got to check the cabin, which they’ll be in no hurry to do, crank call like that. Then check back with Drava, then trace the call. It’ll be the rest of the day, maybe longer.”

“So we’re safe leaving this place untorched?”

I glanced around at the shabby little room. “Sniffer squad won’t get much off what we’ve touched that isn’t blurred with the last dozen occupants. Maybe just enough to confirm against the cabin traces. Not worth worrying about. Anyway, I’m short on incendiaries right now. You?”

She nodded at the door. “Get them anywhere on Kompcho wharf for a couple of hundred a crate.”

“Tempting. Bit rough on the other guests, though.”

A shrug. I grinned.

“Man, wearing that thing’s really pissing you off, isn’t it. Come on, we’ll break the trail somewhere else. Let’s get out of here.”

We went down canted plastic stairs, found a side exit and slipped into the street without checking out. Back into the pulsing flow of deCom commerce and stroll. Groups of sprogs clowning around on corners for attention, crew packs ambling along in the subtly integrated fashion I’d started to notice at Drava. Men, women and machines carrying hardware. Command heads. Dealers of knocked-off chemicals and small novelty devices working from laid-out plastic sheets that shimmered in the sun. The odd religious maniac declaiming to passing jeers. Street entertainers aping the local trends for laughs, running cheap holo storytell and cheaper puppet shows, collection trays out for the sparse shower of near-exhausted credit chips and the hope that not too many spectators would fling the totally exhausted variety. We cut back and forth in it for a while, surveillance evasion habit on my part and a vague interest in some of the acts.

“—the blood curdling story of Mad Ludmila and the Patchwork Man—”

“—hardcore footage from the deCom clinics! See the latest in surgery and body testing to the limits, ladies and gentlemen, to the very limits—”

“—the taking of Drava by heroic deCom teams in full colour—”

“—God—”

“—pirated full sense repro. One hundred per cent guaranteed genuine! Josefina Hikari, Mitzi Harlan, Ito Marriott and many more. Get wet with the most beautiful First Family bodies in surroundings that—”

“—deCom souvenirs. Karakuri fragments—”

On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium.

Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.

Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.

“Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.”

The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.

“See anything you like?”

“Not really, no.” I went up to the counter. “I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.”

“Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.” The woman winked. “Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.”

She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.

She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.

“Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says—see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.” She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. “Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.”

“I said something I could wear.”

“So you did. So you did. Well, Ronin don’t make much smaller than the 86 in the monomol range. You want a slug gun maybe?”

“No, the shredder’s good, but it’s got to be smaller than that. What else have you got?”

The woman sucked at her upper lip. It made her look like a crone.

“Well, there are some of the Old Home brands as well—H&K, Kalashnikov, General Systems. It’s mostly pre-owned, see. Sprog trade-ins for mimint smasher gear. Look. Do you a GS Rapsodia. Scan resistant and very slim, straps flat under clothing but the butt’s automould. Reacts to body heat, swells to fit your grip. How’s that?”

“What’s it ranged at?”

“Depends on dispersal. Tightened up I’d say you could take down a target at forty, fifty metres if your hands don’t shake. On widespread, you don’t get much range at all, but it’ll clean out a room for you.”

I nodded. “How much?”

“Oh, we can come to some arrangement on that.” The woman winked clumsily. “Is your friend buying too?”

Sylvie was on the other side of the emporium, a half dozen metres away.

She heard and glanced across at the datacoil.

“Yeah, I’ll take that Szeged squeeze gun you’re listing there. Is that all the ammunition you’ve got for it?”

“Ah … yes.” The older woman blinked at her, then back at the display.

“But it’ll take a Ronin SPo load too, they made them compatible. I can throw in two or three clips if you—”

“Do that.” Sylvie met my eyes with something in her face I couldn’t read.

“I’ll wait outside.”

“Good idea.”

No one spoke again until Sylvie had brushed through the shell curtains and out. We both stared after her for a couple of moments.

“Knows her datacode,” chirped the woman finally.

I looked at the lined face and wondered if there was anything behind the words. As a blatant demonstration of the deCom power her head had been scarfed to disguise, Sylvie reading detail off the datacoil at distance pretty much screamed for attention. But it wasn’t clear what capacity this other woman’s mind was running on, or if she cared about anything much beyond a quick sale. Or if she’d even remember us in a couple of hours time.

“It’s a trick,” I said weakly. “Shall we, um, talk about price?”

Out in the street, I found Sylvie stood at the edges of a crowd that had gathered in front of a holoshow storyteller. He was an old man, but his hands were nimble on the display controls and a synth-system taped to his throat modulated his voice to fit the different characters of his tale. The holo was a pale orb full of indistinct shapes at his feet. I heard the name Quell as I tugged at Sylvie’s arm.

“Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?”

“Ssh, shut up. Listen.”

“Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—”

“And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,” I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.

“Sssh.”

“—so she squinted and squinted but, well.” The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. “Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—”

A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.

“You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.”

The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.

“And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.

“But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman, and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.”

For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display.

Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.

“So Quell turned to the crowd and asked who among you have not sinned with a whore at one time or another, and the crowd grew quieter and would not meet her eyes. But one of the priests rebuked her angrily for her interference in a matter of holy law, and so she asked him directly have you never been with a whore and many in the crowd who knew him laughed so that he had to admit that he had. But this is different, he said, for lama man.

Then, said Quell, you are a hypocrite, and from her long grey coat she took a heavy-calibre revolver and she shot the priest in both kneecaps. And he collapsed to the ground screaming?

Two tiny bangs and small, shrill shrieks from the holodisplay. The storyteller nodded and cleared his throat

“Someone take him away, Quell commanded, and at this two of the crowd lifted the priest up and carried him off, still screaming. And I would guess that they were glad of the chance to leave because now these people were quiet and afraid when they saw the weapon in Quell’s hand. And as the screaming died away in the distance, there was a silence broken only by the moaning of the seawind along the wharf, and the whimpering of the comely whore at Quell’s feet. And Quell turned herself to the second priest and pointed the heavy-calibre revolver at him. Now you, she said. Will you tell me that you have never been with a whore? And the priest drew himself up and looked her back in the eye, and he said I am a priest, and I have been with no woman in my life for I would not soil the sacredness of my flesh.”

The storyteller struck a dramatic pose and waited.

“He’s pushing his luck with this stuff,” I murmured to Sylvie. “Citadel’s only up the hill.”

But she was oblivious, staring down at the little globe of the holodisplay.

As I watched, she swayed a little.

Oh shit.

I grabbed at her arm and she shook me off irritably.

“Well, Quell looked back at this black-clad man and as she stared into his hot jet eyes she knew that he spoke the truth, that he was a man of his word. So she looked at the revolver in her hand and then back at the man. And she said then you are a fanatic and cannot learn, and she shot him in the face.”

Another report, and the holodisplay splattered vivid red. Close-up on the ruined face of the priest. Applause and whoops among the crowd. The storyteller waited it out with a modest smile. At my side, Sylvie stirred like someone waking up. The storyteller grinned.

“Well now my friends, as you can probably imagine, this comely young whore was most grateful to her rescuer. And when the crowd had carried the second priest’s body away, she invited Quell to her home where she—” The storyteller set down his controls once more and wrapped his arms around himself. He gave a performance shudder and rubbed both hands on his upper arms. ”But it really is too cold to continue, I fear. I could not—”

Amidst a new chorus of protest, I took Sylvie by the arm again and led her away. She said nothing for the first few paces, then vaguely she looked back at the storyteller and then at me.

“I’ve never been to Sharya,” she said in a puzzled voice.

“No, and I’m willing to bet nor has he.” I looked her carefully in the eyes. “And Quell certainly never got to go there either. But it makes a good story, right?”

FIFTEEN

I bought a pack of disposable phones from an alcove dealer on the waterfront and used one of them to call Lazlo. His voice came through wavery with the squabble of antique jamming and counterjamming that floated over New Hok like smog from some early millennium city on Earth. The wharfside noises around me didn’t help much. I pinned the phone hard against my ear.

“You’ll have to speak up,” I told him.

“…said she’s still not well enough to use the net, then?”

“She says not. But she’s holding up okay. Listen, I’ve set the traces. You can expect a very pissed-off Kurumaya to come battering down your door later today. Better start practising your alibis.”

“Who, me?”

I grinned despite myself. “Any sign of this Kovacs then?”

His reply was inaudible behind a sudden thicket of static and flutter.

“Say again?”

“…in this morning, said he saw the Skull Gang up near Sopron yesterday with some faces he didn’t know, looked li—… south at speed. Probably get in some time tonight.”

“Alright. When Kovacs does show up, you watch yourselves. The man is a dangerous piece of shit. You keep it tight. Scan up.”

“Will do.” A long, static-laced pause. “Hey, Micky, you’re taking good care of her, right?”

I snorted. “No, I’m about to scalp her and sell off the spare capacity to a data brokerage. What do you think?”

“I know you ca—” Another wave of distortion squelched his voice. “… f not, then get her to someone who can help.”

“Yeah, we’re working on that.”

“…Millsport?”

I guessed at content. “I don’t know. Not yet, at any rate.”

“If that’s what it takes, man.” His voice was fading out now, faint with distance and wrenched with the jamming. “Whatever it takes.”

“Las, I’m losing you. I’ve got to go.”

“…an up, Micky.”

“Yeah, you too. I’ll be in touch.”

I cut the connection, took the phone away from my ear and weighed it in my hand. I stared out to sea for a long time. Then I dug out a fresh phone and dialled another number from decades-old memory.

Like a lot of the towns on Harlan’s World, Tekitomura clung to the skirts of a mountain range up to its waist in the ocean. Available space for building on was scarce. Back around the time that Earth was gearing up for the Pleistocene ice age, it seems that Harlan’s World suffered a rapid climatic change in the opposite direction. The poles melted to ragged remnants and the oceans rose to drown all but two of the little planet’s continents. Mass extinctions followed, among them a rather promising race of tusked shore-dwellers who, there’s some evidence to suggest, had developed rudimentary stone tools, fire and a religion based on the complicated gravitational dance of Harlan’s World’s three moons.

It wasn’t enough to save them, apparently.

The colonising Martians, when they arrived, didn’t seem to have a problem with the limited terrain. They built intricate, towering eyries directly into the rock of the steepest mountain slopes and largely ignored the small nubs and ledges of land available at sea level. Half a million years later, the Martians were gone but the ruins of their eyries endured for the new wave of human colonisers to gawp at and leave mostly alone. Astrogation charts unearthed in abandoned cities on Mars had brought us this far, but once we arrived we were on our own. Unwinged, and denied much of our usual sky-going technology by the orbitals, humanity settled for conventional cities on two continents, a sprawling multi-islanded metropolis at the heart of the Millsport Archipelago, and small, strategically located ports elsewhere to provide linkage. Tekitomura was a ten-kilometre strip of densely-built waterfront, backed up as far as the brooding mountains behind would allow and thereafter thinning out to nothing. On a rocky foothill, the citadel glowered over the skyline, perhaps aspiring in its elevation towards the semi-mystical status of a Martian ruin. Further back, the narrow mountain tracks blasted by human archaeologue teams threaded their way up to the real thing.

There were no archaeologues working the Tekitomura sites any more. Grants for anything not related to cracking the military potential of the orbitals had been cut to the bone, and those Guild Masters not absorbed by the military contracting had long since shipped out to the Latimer system on the hypercast. Pockets of stubborn and largely self-funding wild talent held out at a few promising sites near Millsport and points south, but on the mountainside above Tekitomura, the dig encampments sat forlorn and empty, as abandoned as the skeletal Martian towers they had been built next to.

“Sounds too good to be true,” I said as we bought provisions in a waterfront straight-to-street. “You’re sure we’re not going to be sharing this place with a bunch of teenage lovebirds and wirehead derelicts?”

For answer, she gave me a significant look and tugged at a single lock of her hair that had escaped from the cling of the headscarf. I shrugged.

“Alright then.” I hefted a sealpack of amphetamine cola. “Cherry flavoured okay?”

“No. It tastes like shit. Get the plain.”

We bought packs to carry the provisions, picked an upward-sloping street out of the wharf district, more or less at random, and walked. In under an hour, the noise and buildings began to fade out behind us and the incline grew steeper. I kept glancing across at Sylvie as our pace slacked off and our steps became more deliberate, but she showed no sign of wavering.

If anything, the crisp air and cold sunlight seemed to be doing her good. The tense frown that had flitted on and off her face all morning ironed out and she even smiled once or twice. As we climbed higher, the sun glinted off exposed mineral traces in the surrounding rocks, and the view became worth stopping for. We rested a couple of times to drink water and gaze out over the shoreline sprawl of Tekitomura and the sea beyond.

“Must have been cool to be a Martian,” she said at one point.

“I suppose.”

The first eyrie crept into view on the other side of a vast rock buttress.

It towered the best part of a kilometre straight up, all twists and swellings that were hard to look at comfortably. Landing flanges rolled out like tongues with slices cut out of them, spires sported wide, vented roofing hung with roost-bars and other less identifiable projections. Entrances gaped, an anarchic variety of oval-derived openings from long, slim, vaginal to plumped-up heart shape and everything between. Cabling dangled everywhere. You got the fleeting but repeating impression that the whole structure would sing in a high wind, and maybe somehow revolve like a gargantuan windchime.

On the approach track, the human structures huddled small and solid, like ugly puppies at the feet of a fairytale princess. Five cabins in a style not much more recent than the relics on New Hok, all showing the faint blue interior light of damped-down automated systems. We stopped at the first one we came to and dumped our packs. I squinted back and forth at angles of fire, tagging potential cover for any attackers and thinking about delivery solutions that would beat it. It was a more or less automatic process, the Envoy conditioning killing time the way some people whistle through their teeth.

Sylvie ripped off her headscarf and shook her hair free with obvious relief.

“Be a minute,” she said.

I considered my semi-instinctive assessment of the dig site’s defensibility.

On any planet where you could go up in the air easily, we’d be a sitting target. But on Harlan’s World, the normal rules don’t apply. Top mass limit on flying machines is a six-seat helicopter running an antique rotor-motor lift, no smart systems and no mounted beam weaponry. Anything else gets turned into mid-air ash. Likewise individual flyers in antigrav harnesses or nanocopters. The angelfire restrictions are, it appears, as much about a level of technology as physical mass. Add to that a height limit of about four hundred metres, which we were already well above, and it was safe to assume that the only way anyone would be approaching us was on foot up the path. Or climbing the sheer drop alongside, which they were very welcome to do.

Behind me, Sylvie grunted in satisfaction and I turned to see the cabin door flex itself open. She gestured ironically.

“After you, professor.”

The blue standby light flickered and blinked up to white as we carried our packs inside, and from somewhere I heard the whisper of aircon kicking in. A datacoil spiralled awake on the table in one corner. The air reeked of antibacterials, but you could smell that it was shifting as the systems registered occupancy. I shoved my pack into a corner, peeled off my jacket and grabbed a chair.

“Kitchen facilities are in one of the others,” Sylvie said, wandering about and opening internal doors. “But most of this stuff we bought is self-heating anyway. And everything else we need, we’ve got. Bathroom there. Beds in there, there and there. No automould, sorry. Specs I ran into when I was doing the locks say it sleeps six. Data systems wired in, linked directly into the global net through the Millsport University stack.”

I nodded and passed my hand idly through the datacoil. Opposite me, a severely dressed young woman shimmered into sudden existence. She made a quaint formal bow.

“Professor Serendipity.”

I glanced at Sylvie. “Very funny.”

“I am Dig 301. How may I help you?”

I yawned and looked round the room. “Does this place run any defensive systems, Dig?”

“If you are referring to weapons,” said the construct delicately, “I am afraid not. Discharge of projectiles or ungoverned energy so close to a site of such xenological significance would be unpardonable. However, all site units do lock on a coding system that is extremely hard to break.”

I shot another glance at Sylvie. She grinned. I cleared my throat.

“Right. What about surveillance? How far down the mountain do your sensors reach?”

“My awareness range covers only the site and ancillary buildings. However, through the totality of the global datalink, I can access—”

“Yeah, thanks. That’ll be all.”

The construct winked out, leaving the room behind looking momentarily gloomy and still. Sylvie stepped across to the main door and thumbed it closed. She gestured around.

“Think we’ll be safe here?”

I shrugged, remembering Tanaseda’s threat. A global writ for your capture. “As safe as anywhere else I can think of right now. Personally, I’d be heading out for Millsport tonight, but that’s exactly why—”

I stopped. She looked at me curiously.

“Exactly why what?”

Exactly why we’re nicking with an idea you came up with and not me.

Because anything I come up with, there’s a good chance he’s going to come up with too.

“Exactly what they’ll expect us to do,” I amended. “If we’re lucky they’ll skip right past us on the fastest transport south they can arrange.”

She took the chair opposite me and straddled it.

“Yeah. Leaving us to do what meantime?”

“Is that a proposition?”

It was out before I realised I’d said it. Her eyes widened.

“You—”

“Sorry. I’m sorry, that was. A joke.”

As a lie, it would have got me thrown out of the Envoys to howls of derision. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura shaking her head in disbelief.

It wouldn’t have convinced a Loyko monk shot up with credence sacrament for Acceptance Fortnight. And it certainly didn’t convince Sylvie Oshima.

“Look, Micky,” she said slowly. “I know I owe you for that night with the Beards. And I like you. A lot. But—”

“Hey, seriously. It was a joke, okay. A bad joke.”

“I’m not saying I haven’t thought about it. I think I even dreamed about it a couple of nights ago.” She grinned and something happened in my stomach. “You believe that?”

I manufactured another shrug. “If you say so.”

“It’s just.” She shook her head. “I don’t know you, Micky. I don’t know you any better than I did six weeks ago, and that’s a little scary.”

“Yeah well; changed sleeves. That can—”

“No. That’s not it. You’re locked up, Micky. Tighter than anyone I’ve ever met, and believe me I’ve met some fucked-up cases in this business. You walked into that bar, Tokyo Crow, with nothing but that knife you carry and you killed them all like it was a habit. And all the time, you had this little smile.” She touched her hair, awkwardly it seemed to me. “This stuff, I get pretty much total recall when I want it. I saw your face, I can still see it now. You were smiling, Micky.”

I said nothing.

“I don’t think I want to go to bed with someone like that. Well,” she smiled a little herself. “That’s a lie. Part of me does, part of me really wants to. But that’s a part I’ve learnt not to trust.”

“Probably very wise.”

“Yeah. Probably.” She shook hair back from her face and tried on a firmer smile. Her eyes hit mine again. “So you went up to the citadel and you took their cortical stacks. What for, Micky?”

I smiled back. Got up from the chair. “You know, Sylvie, part of me really wants to tell you. But—”

“Alright, alright—”

“—it’s a part of me I’ve learnt not to trust.”

“Very witty.”

“I try. Look, I’m going to go check a couple of things outside before it starts getting dark. Be back in a while. You think you still owe me for the Beards, do me a small favour while I’m gone. Try to forget I came on quite as crass as I did just now. I’d really appreciate that.”

She looked away, at the datacoil. Her voice was very quiet.

“Sure. No problem.”

No, there’s a problem. I bit back the words as I made my way to the door. There really fucking is. And I still have no idea what to do about it.

The second call picks up almost at once. A brusque male voice, not interested in talking to anyone.

“Yeah?”

“Yaroslav?”

“Yeah.” Impatiently. “Who’s this?” “A little blue bug.”

Silence opens like a knife wound behind the words. Not even static to cover it.

Compared to the connection I had with Lazlo, the line is crystal clear. I can hear the shock at the other end.

“Who is this?” His voice has shifted completely. Hardened like sprayed evercrete.

“Enable the videofeed, I want to see a face.”

“Wouldn’t help you much. I’m not wearing anything you’d recognise.”

“Do I know you?”

“Let’s just say you didn’t have much faith in me when I went to Latimer, and I lived up to that lack of faith perfectly.”

“You! You’re back on the World?”

“No, I’m calling from orbit. What the fuck do you think?”

Long pause. Breathing on the line. I look up and down the Kompcho wharf with reflexive caution.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

Another hesitation. “She’s not here.”

“Yeah, right. Put her on.”

“I mean it. She left.” There’s a catch in the throat as he says it—enough to believe him. “When did you get back?”

“A while ago. Where’s she gone?”

“I don’t know. If I had to guess…” His voice dies off in breath blown through slack lips. I shoot a glance at the watch I ransacked from the bunker in the Uncleared. It’s been keeping perfect time for three hundred years, indifferent to human absence. After years of chipped-in time displays, it still feels a little odd, a little archaic.

“You do have to guess. This is important.”

“You never told anyone you were coming back. We thought—”

“Yeah, I’m not much for homecoming parties. Now guess. Where’s she gone?”

I can hear the way his lips tighten. “Try Vchira.”

“Vchira Beach? Oh, come on.”

“Believe what you like. Take it or leave it.”

“After all this time? I thought—”

“Yeah, so did I. But after she left, I tried to—” He stops. Click in his throat as he swallows. “We still had joint accounts. She paid hard-class passage south on a Kossuth speed freighter, bought herself a new sleeve when she got there. Surfer specs. Cleaned out her account to make the price. Burnt it all. She’s, I know she’s down there with fucking—”

It chokes off. Thick silence. Some corroded vestige of decency makes me wince.

Keeps my voice gentle.

“So you think Brasil’s still around, huh?”

“What changes on Vchira Beach?” he asks bitterly.

“Alright, Yaros. That’s all I need. Thanks, man.” A cranked eyebrow at my own words. “You take it easy, huh.”

He grunts. Just as I’m about to kill the connection, he clears his throat and starts to speak.

“Listen, if you see her. Tell her …”

I wait.

Ah, fuck it.” And he hangs up.

Daylight fading.

Below me, lights were starting to come on across Tekitomura as night breathed in from the sea. Hotei sat fatly on the western horizon, painting a dappled orange path across the water towards the shore. Marikanon hung coppery and bitten at one edge overhead. Out to sea, the running lights of sweepers already studded the deeper gloom. Faintly, the sounds of the port floated up to me. No sleep at deCom.

I glanced back towards the archaeologue cabin and the Martian eyrie caught at the corner of my eye. It rose massive and skeletal into the darkening sky on my right, like the bones of something long dead. The copper-orange mix of moonlight fell through apertures in the structure and emerged at sometimes surprising angles. There was a cold breeze coming in with the night and the dangling cables stirred idly on it.

We avoid them because we can’t make much use of them on a world like this, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. I knew an archaeologue once who told me human settlement patterns avoid the relics of Martian civilisation like this on every world in the Protectorate. It’s instinctive, she told me. Atavistic fear. Even the dig towns start to die as soon as the excavations stop. No one stays around from choice.

I stared into the maze of shattered moonlight and shadow made by the eyrie, and I felt a little of that atavistic fear seeping into me. It was all too easy to imagine, in the failing light, the slow-paced strop of broad wings and a spiral of raptor silhouettes turning against the evening sky above, bigger and more angular than anything that had flown on earth in human memory.

I shrugged off the thought, irritably.

Let’s just focus on the real problems we’ve got, eh, Micky? It’s not like there aren’t enough of them.

The door of the cabin flexed open and light spilled out, making me abruptly aware of how chilly the air had turned.

“You coming in to eat something?” she asked.

SIXTEEN

Time on the mountain did nothing much to help.

The first morning, I slept in but it left me headachy and vague when I finally ventured out of the bedroom. Eishundo Organics didn’t design their sleeves for decadence, it seemed. Sylvie was not around, but the table was littered with breakfast items of one sort or another, tabs mostly pulled. I poked around in the debris and found an unused coffee canister, tabbed it and drank it standing at the window. Half-recalled dreams skittered about in the back of my head, mostly cell-deep stuff about drowning.

Legacy of the overlong time the sleeve had been tanked—I’d had the same thing at the beginning in the Uncleared. Mimint engagement and the rapid flow of life with Sylvie’s Slipins had damped it out in favour of more conventional flight-and-fight scenarios and reconstituted gibberish from the memories of my own overlaid consciousness.

“You are awake,” said Dig 301, glimmering into existence at the edges of my vision.

I glanced over at her and raised my coffee canister. “Getting there.”

“Your colleague left a message for you. Would you like to hear it?”

“I suppose.”

“Micky, I’m going for a walk into town.” Sylvie’s voice came out of the construct’s mouth without a corresponding shift in visuals. In my fragile state of wakefulness, it hit me harder than it should have. Spikily incongruous, and an unwelcome reminder of my central problem. “Bury myself in the datawash down there. I want to see if I can get the net up and running, maybe use it to call through to Orr and the others. See what’s going on over there. I’ll bring back some stuff. Message ends.”

The sudden re-emergence of the construct’s own voice made me blink. I nodded and carried my coffee to the table. Cleared some of the breakfast litter away from the datacoil and brooded on it for a while. Dig 301 hovered at my back.

“So I can get into Millsport University through this, right? Search their general stack?”

“It will be quicker if you ask me,” said the construct modestly.

“Alright. Do me a précis search on.” I sighed. “Quellcrist F—”

“Commencing.” Whether out of boredom at the years of disuse or just poor intonation recognition, the construct was already off and running.

The datacoil brightened and expanded. A miniature copy of Dig 301’s head and shoulders appeared near the top and started in on the précis.

Illustrative images tumbled into the space beneath. I watched, yawning, and let it run. “Found, one, Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed. Quellcrist is a species of shallow-water seaweed, ochre in colour, found mostly in temperate zones. Though containing some nutrients, it does not compare well in this with Earth-origin or purpose-bred hybrid species and is not therefore considered a sufficiently economic food crop to cultivate.”

I nodded. Not where I wanted to start, but—

“Some medicinal substances may be extracted from mature Quellcrist strands but outside of certain small communities in the south of the Millsport Archipelago, the practice is uncommon. Quellcrist is in fact remarkable only for its unusual life cycle. If and when stranded in waterless conditions for long periods of time, the plant’s pods dry out to a black powder which can be carried by the wind over hundreds of kilometres. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into micro fronds from which a whole plant may grow in a matter of weeks.

“Found, two, Quellcrist Falconer, nom de guerre of Settlement-Years insurgent leader and political thinker Nadia Makita, born Millsport, April 18th 47 (Colonial Reckoning), died October 33rd 105. Only child of Millsport journalist Stefan Makita and marine engineer Fusako Kimura. Makita studied demodynamics at Millsport University and published a controversial master’s thesis, Gender Role Leakage and the New Mythology as well as three collections of verse in Stripjap, which quickly attained cult status among the Millsport literati. In later life—”

“Can you give me a little closer focus here, Dig.”

“In the winter of 67, Makita left academia, reputedly turning down both a generous offer of a research post within the faculty of social sciences and literary patronage from a leading member of the First Families. Between October 67 and May 71, she travelled widely on Harlan’s World, supported partly by her parents and partly through a variety of menial jobs including belaweed cutter and ledgefruit harvester. It is generally thought that Makita’s experiences among these workers helped to harden her political convictions. Pay and conditions for both groups were uniformly poor, with debilitating illnesses common on the belaweed farms and fall fatalities high among the ledgefruit workers.

“In any event, by the beginning of 69, Makita was publishing articles in the radical journals New Star and Sea of Change in which a clear departure can be traced from the liberal reformist tendency she had evinced as a student (and to which her parents both subscribed). In its place, she proposed a new revolutionary ethic which borrowed from existing strands of extremist thought but was remarkable for the vitriol with which said strands were themselves savagely critiqued almost as much as ruling class policy. This approach did nothing to endear her to the radical intelligentsia of the period and she found herself, though recognised as a brilliant thinker, increasingly isolated from the revolutionary mainstream. Lacking a descriptor for her new political theory, she named it Quellism via an article The Occasional Revolution, in which she argued that modern revolutionaries must when deprived of nourishment by oppressive forces blow away across the land like Quellcrist dust, ubiquitous and traceless but bearing within them the power of revolutionary regeneration where and whensoever fresh nourishment may arise. It is generally accepted that her own adoption of the name Quellcrist followed shortly after and derives from this same source of inspiration. The origin of the surname Falconer, however, remains in dispute.

“With the outbreak of the Kossuth belaweed riots in May 71 and the resulting crackdown, Makita made her first appearance as a guerrilla in—”

“Hold it.” The canister coffee wasn’t great and the steady march of comfortably familiar fact had grown hypnotic as I sat there. I yawned again and got up to toss the canister. “Okay, maybe not that close-focused after all. Can we skip further forward.”

“A revolution,” said Dig 301 obligingly, “Which the newly ascendant Quellists could not hope to win whilst holding down internal opposition from—”

“Further than that. Let’s get to the second front.”

“Fully twenty-five years later, that seemingly rhetorical boast now at last came to fruition as a working axiom. To use Makita’s own imagery, the Quellcrist powder that Konrad Harlan’s self-described harrowing storm of justice had blown far and wide in the aftermath of the Quellist defeat now sprouted new resistance in a dozen different places. Makita’s second front began exactly as she had predicted it would, but this time the insurgency dynamic had shifted beyond recognition. In the context of …”

Digging around in the packs for more coffee, I let the narrative wash over me. This too I knew. By the time of the second front, Quellism was no longer the new fish on the reef. A generation of quiet incubation under the heel of the Harlanite crackdown had made it the only radical force left on the World. Other tendencies brandished their guns or sold their souls and were taken down all the same, stripped back to a bitter and disillusioned rump of has-beens by Protectorate-backed government forces.

The Quellists meanwhile simply slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita had always argued they should be prepared to do. Technology has given us access to timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, we must be prepared to use that timescale, to live on that timescale, if we are to realise our own dreams. And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger and fed at core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising; the whisper that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.

If the semi-mythical nature of her twenty-five-year existence as a fugitive had been difficult for the security forces to get to grips with, Nadia Makita’s return was worse. She was fifty-three years old but sleeved in new flesh, impossible even for intimate acquaintances to identify. She stalked through the ruins of the previous revolution like a vengeful ghost and her first victims were the backbiters and betrayers from within the ranks of the old alliance. This time, there would be no factional squabbles to diffract the focus, hamstring the Quellist lead and sell her out to the Harlanites.

The neoMaoists, the Communitarians, the New Sun Path, the Parliament Gradualists and the Social Libertarians. She sought them out as they sat in their dotage, muttering over their respective fumbled grabs at power, and she slaughtered them all.

By the time she turned on the First Families and their tame assembly, it was no longer a revolution.

It was the Unsettlement.

It was a war.

Three years, and the final assault on Millsport.

I tabbed the second coffee and drank it while Dig 301 read the story to its close. As a kid, I’d heard it countless times and always hoped each telling for a last minute reversal, a reprieve from the inevitable tragedy.

“With Millsport firmly in the hands of government forces, the Quellist assault broken and a moderate compromise being brokered in the assembly,

Makita perhaps believed that her enemies would have other more pressing matters to attend to before hunting her down. She had above all believed in their love of expediency, but faulty intelligence led her to misjudge the vital role her own capture or elimination had to play in the peace accord. By the time the error was realised, flight was all but impossible …”

Scratch the ‘all but’. Harlan sent more warships to ring the Alabardos Crater than had been deployed in any single naval engagement of the war.

Crack helicopter pilots flew their craft at the upper edges of the four-hundred-metre limit with semi-suicidal brinkmanship. Spec ops snipers crammed inside, armed with weapons as heavy as it was thought the orbitals’ parameters would permit. Orders were to bring down any escaping aircraft by all and any means including, if necessary, mid-air collision.

“In a final, desperate attempt to save her, Makita’s followers risked a high-level flight in a stripped-down jetcopter which it was believed the orbital platforms might ignore. However—”

“Yeah, okay, Dig. That’ll do.” I drained my coffee. However, they fucked up. However, the plan was flawed (or possibly a deliberate betrayal). However, a lance of angelfire lashed down from the sky over Alabardos and carved the jetcopter into a flash-burnt mid-air image of itself. However, Nadia Makita floated gently down to the ocean as randomised organic molecules amongst metallic ash. I didn’t need to hear it again. “What about the escape legends?”

“As with all heroic figures, legends about Quellcrist Falconer’s secret escape from real death are rife.” Dig 301’s voice seemed faintly tinged with reproach, but that might have been my groggy imagination. “There are those who believe she never entered the jetcopter in the first place and that later she slipped away from Alabardos disguised among the occupying ground troops. More credible theories derive from the idea that at some point before her death, Falconer’s consciousness was backed up and that she was revived once the post-war hysteria had died down.”

I nodded. “So where would they have stored her?”

“Beliefs vary.” The construct raised one elegant hand and extended slim fingers in sequence. “Some claim she was needlecast offworld, either to a deep-space datavault—”

“Oh yeah, that’s likely.”

“—or to another of the Settled Worlds where she had friends. Adoracion and Nkrumah’s Land are the favourites. Another theory suggests that she was stored after sustaining a combat injury in New Hokkaido from which she was expected to die. That when she recovered, her followers abandoned or forgot the copy—”

“Yep. As you would with your honoured hero-leader’s consciousness.”

Dig 301 frowned at the interruption. “The theory presupposes widespread, chaotic fighting, extensive sudden deaths and a breakdown of overall communication. Such salients did occur at various stages in the New Hokkaido campaigns.”

“Hmm.”

“Millsport is another theorised location. Historians of the period have argued that the Makita family was sufficiently elevated among the middle class to have had access to discreet storage facilities. Many data brokerage firms have successfully fought legal battles to maintain the anonymity of such stacks. The total discreet storage capacity in the Millsport metropolitan zone is estimated at over—”

“So which theory do you believe?”

The construct stopped so abruptly her mouth stayed open. A ripple blinked through the projected presence. Tiny machine-code specs shimmered briefly into existence at her right hip, left breast and across her eyes.

Her voice took the flattened tone of rote.

“I am a Harkany Datasystems service construct, enabled at basic interactional level. I cannot answer that question.”

“No beliefs, huh?”

“I perceive only data and the probability gradients it provides.”

“Sounds good to me. Do the math. What’s the majority probability here?”

“The highest likelihood outcome from the data available is that Nadia Makita was aboard the Quellist jetcopter at Alabardos, was vaporised with it by orbital fire and no longer exists.”

I nodded again and sighed.

“Right.”

Sylvie came back a couple of hours later, carrying fresh fruit and a hotbox full of spiced shrimpcakes. We ate without talking much.

“Did you get through?” I asked her at one point.

“No.” She shook her head, chewing. “There’s something wrong. I can feel it. I can feel them out there, but I can’t pin down enough for a transmission link.”

Her eyes lowered, creased in a frown that looked like pain.

“There’s something wrong,” she repeated quietly.

“You didn’t take the scarf off, did you?”

She looked at me. “No. I didn’t take the scarf off. That doesn’t affect functionality, Micky. It just pisses me off.”

I shrugged. “You and me both.”

Her eyes tracked to the pocket where I habitually kept the excised cortical stacks, but she said nothing.

We stayed out of each other’s way for the rest of the day. Sylvie sat at the datacoil most of the time, periodically inducing shifts in the coloured display without touching it or speaking. At one point, she went into her bedroom and lay on the automould for an hour, staring at the ceiling.

Glancing in on my way past to the bathroom, I saw her lips moving silently. I took a shower, stood by the window, ate fruit and drank coffee I didn’t want. Eventually I went outside and wandered around the margins of the eyrie’s base, talking desultorily to Dig 301 who, for some reason, had taken it upon herself to tag along. Maybe she was there to make sure I didn’t deface anything.

An undefined tension sat in the cold mountain air. Like sex unperformed, like bad weather coming in.

We can’t stay like this forever, I knew. Something has to give.

But instead it got dark and after another monosyllabic meal, we went to our separate beds early. I lay in the deadened quiet of the cabin’s soundproofing, imagining night sounds that mostly belonged to a climate much further south. It hit me suddenly that I should have been there nearly two months back. Envoy conditioning—focus on your immediate surroundings and cope—had kept me from thinking about it much over the past several weeks, but whenever I had time my mind slipped back to Newpest and the Weed Expanse. It wasn’t like anyone would be missing me exactly, but appointments had been made and now broken, and Radul Segesvar would be wondering if my silent disappearance might in fact signify detection and capture, with all the associated grief that could bring home to him on the Expanse. Segesvar owed me, but it was a debt of arguable worth and with the southern mafias, it doesn’t do to push that angle too hard. The haiduci don’t have the ethical discipline of the yakuza. And at a couple of months silently overdue, I was pushing it to the limit.

My hands were itching again. Gene-twitch of the desire to grab a rock surface and scale it the fuck out of here.

Face it, Micky. It’s time to cut loose from this. Your deCom days are over. Fun while it lasted, and it got you a new face and these gekko hands, but enough’s enough. It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

I turned on my side and stared at the wall. On the other side, Sylvie would be lying in the same quiet, the same automould isolation. Maybe the same harbour chop of distressed sleep as well.

What am I supposed to do? Leave her?

You’ve done worse.

I saw Orr’s accusatory stare. You don’t flicking touch her.

Heard Lazlo’s voice. I’m trusting you, Micky.

Yeah, my own voice jeered through me. He’s trusting Micky. Takeshi Kovacs, he hasn’t met yet.

And if she is who she says she is?

Oh, come on. Quellcrist Falconer? You heard the machine. Quellcrist Falconer got turned into airborne ash at seven hundred metres above Alabardos.

Then who is she? The ghost, the one in the stack. Maybe she’s not Nadia Makita, but she sure as hell thinks she is. And she sure as fuck isn’t Sylvie Oshima. So who is she?

No idea. Is that supposed to be your problem?

I don’t know, is it?

Your problem is that the yakuza have hired your own sweet self out of some archive stack to take you down. Very fucking poetic and you know what, he’ll probably do not a bad job for them. He’ll certainly have the resources—a global writ, remember. And you can bet the incentive scheme has a real fucking edge on it. You know the rules on double sleeving.

And at the moment the only thing linking all this to that sleeve you’re wearing is the woman next door and her low-grade mercenary pals. So the sooner you cut loose from them, head south and get on with the job in hand, the better for all concerned.

The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.

And stop fucking calling me that.

Impatiently, I threw off the cover and got out of bed. I cracked the door and saw an empty room beyond. The table and the weaving datacoil, bright in the darkness, the bulk of our two packs leaning together in a corner. Hotei light painted the shapes of the windows in pale orange on the floor. I trod naked through the moonsplash and crouched by the packs, rooting around for a can of amphetamine cola.

Fuck sleep.

I heard her behind me, and turned with a cold, unfamiliar unease feathering my bones. Not knowing who I’d be face to face with.

“You too, huh?”

It was Sylvie Oshima’s voice, Sylvie Oshima’s slightly quizzical lupine look as she stood facing me with arms wrapped around herself. She was naked as well, breasts gathered up and pressed in the V of her arms like a gift she planned to give me. Hips tilted in mid-step, one curved thigh slightly behind the other. Hair in tangled disarray around her sleep smudged face. In the light from Hotei, her pale skin took on tones of warm copper and fireglow. She smiled uncertainly.

“I keep waking up. Feels like my head’s running on overdrive.” She nodded at the cola can in my hand. “That isn’t going to help, you know.”

“I don’t feel like sleeping.” My voice came out a little hoarse.

“No.” The smile inked out to sudden seriousness. “I don’t feel like sleeping either. I feel like doing what you wanted before.”

She unfolded her arms and her breasts hung free. A little self-consciously, she raised her arms and pushed back the mass of her hair, pressing her hands to the back of her head. She shifted her legs so that her thighs brushed together. Between the angles of her lifted elbows, she was watching me carefully.

“Do you like me like this?”

“I.” The posture raised and modelled her breasts higher on her chest. I could feel the blood rushing into my cock. I cleared my throat. “I like you like that very much.”

“Good.”

And she stood without moving, watching me. I dropped the cola can on top of the pack it had come from and took a step towards her. Her arms unlinked and draped themselves around my shoulders, tightening across my back. I filled one hand with the soft weight of her breast, reached down with the other to the juncture of her thighs and the remembered dampness that—”

“No, wait.” She pushed the lower hand away. “Not there, not yet.”

It was a tiny jarring moment, a jolt to expectations mapped out in the bubblefab two days earlier. I shrugged it off and gathered both hands to the breast I held, squeezing the nipple forward and sucking it into my mouth. She reached down and took my erection in her hand, stroking it back and forth with a touch that seemed forever on the point of letting go.

I frowned, remembering a harder, more confident grip from before, and closed her hand tighter with my own. She chuckled.

“Oh, sorry.”

Stumbling a little, I pushed her to the edge of the table, pulled loose of her grip and knelt on the floor in front of her. She murmured something deep in her throat and spread her legs a little, leaning back and bracing herself on the table top with both hands.

“I want your mouth on me,” she said thickly.

I ran spread hands up her thighs and pressed the ball of each thumb either side of her cunt. A shiver ran through her and her lips parted. I bent my head and slid my tongue inside her. She made a tight, caught-up sound and I grinned. She felt the smile somehow and one hand slapped me across the shoulder.

“Bastard. Don’t you fucking stop, you bastard.”

I pushed her legs wider and went to work in earnest. Her hand came back to knead at my shoulder and neck and she shifted restlessly on the edge of table, hips tilting back and forth with the motion of my tongue.

The hand moved to tangle in my hair. I managed another split grin against the pressure she was exerting but this time she was too far gone to say anything coherent. She started to murmur, whether to me or herself

I couldn’t tell. At first it was simply the repeated syllables of assent, but as she tightened towards climax, something else began to emerge. Lost in what I was doing, it took me time to recognise it for what it was. In the throes of orgasm, Sylvie Oshima was chanting a skein of machine code.

She finished with a hard judder and two hands crushing my head into the juncture of her thighs. I reached back and gently prised her grip away, rose to my feet against her, grinning.

And found myself face to face with another woman.

It was impossible to define what had changed, but Envoy sense read it out for me and the absolute knowledge behind was like an elevator dropping through my stomach.

Nadia Makita was back.

She was there in the narrowing of the eyes and the deep quirk in one corner of her mouth that didn’t belong to any expression Sylvie Oshima owned. In a kind of hunger that licked around her face like flames, and in breath that came in short, harsh bursts as if the orgasm, once spent, was now creeping back in some mirror-image replay.

“Hello there, Micky Serendipity,” she husked.

Her breathing slowed and her mouth twisted into a grin to replace the one that had just melted off my own face. She slipped off the table, reached down and touched me between the legs. It was the old, confident grasp I remembered, but I’d lost a lot of my erection with the shock.

“Something wrong?” she murmured.

“I—” She was using both hands on me like someone gently gathering in rope. I felt myself swelling again. She watched my face.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said quickly.

“Good.”

She slid elegantly down on one knee, eyes still locked on mine, and took the head of my cock into her mouth. One hand stayed on the shaft, stroking while the other found its way to my right thigh and curled around the muscle there, gripping hard.

This is flecking insane, a cold, mission-time shard of Envoy selfhood told me. You need to stop this right now.

And her eyes still on me, as her tongue and teeth and hand drove me into the explosion.

SEVENTEEN

Later, we lay draped wetly across each other in my bed, hands still loosely linked from the last frantic clasping. Our skins were sticky in patches with the mixed juices we’d spilled, and repeated climaxes had stung our muscles into lax submission. Flash images of what we’d done to and with each other kept replaying behind my eyes. I saw her crouched on top of me, crossed hands flat on my chest, pressing down hard with each movement. I saw myself slamming into her from behind. I saw her cunt descending onto my face. I saw her writhing under me, sucking wildly on the central cord of her own hair while I thrust between legs she had crooked over my hips like a vice. I saw myself taking the cord, wet with her saliva, into my own mouth as she laughed into my face and came with a powerful clenching of muscles that dragged me down after her.

But when she started talking to me, the altered lilt of her Amanglic sent an instant shiver down my spine.

“What?” She must have felt the shudder go through me.

“Nothing.”

She rolled her head to face me. I could feel her stare pinned to the side of my face like heat. “I asked you a question. What’s the matter?”

I closed my eyes briefly.

“Nadia, right?”

“Yes.”

“Nadia Makita.”

“Yes.”

I glanced sideways at her. “How the fuck did you get here, Nadia?”

“What is that, a metaphysical question?”

“No. Technological.” I propped myself up on one arm and gestured at her body. Envoy response conditioning or not, most of me was amazed at the detached sense of calm I was managing. “You can’t be unaware of what’s going on here. You live in the command software, and sometimes you get out. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess you come up through the basic instinct channels, riding the surge. Sex, maybe fear or fury too. Stuff like that blots out a lot of the conscious mind’s functions, and that’d give you the space. But—”

“You’re some kind of expert, are you?”

“Used to be.” I watched her for reaction. “I was an Envoy once.”

“A what?”

“Doesn’t matter. What I want to know is while you’re here, what’s happened to Sylvie Oshima?”

“Who?”

“You’re wearing her fucking body, Nadia. Don’t get obtuse on me.”

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t really want to talk about this.”

“No, you probably don’t. And you know what, nor do I. But sooner or later, we’re going to have to. You know that.”

Long quiet. She opened her legs and rubbed absently at a patch of flesh on her inner thigh. She reached across and squeezed my shrunken prick. I took her hand and pushed it gently away.

“Forget it, Nadia. I’m wrung out. Even Mitzi Harlan couldn’t get another hard-on out of me tonight. It’s time to talk. Now where is Sylvie Oshima?”

She rolled away from me again.

“I’m supposed to be this woman’s keeper?” she asked bitterly. “You think I’m in control of this?”

“Maybe not. But you’ve got to have some idea.”

More quiet, but this time it quivered with tension. I waited. Finally, she rolled back to face me, eyes desperate.

“I dream this fucking Oshima, do you know that,” she hissed. “She’s a fucking dream, how am I supposed to know where she goes when I wake up?”

“Yeah, she dreams you too, apparently.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

I sighed. “Tell me what you dream.”

“Why?”

“Because, Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.”

The eyes flared.

“Alright,” she snapped. “I dream that you scare her. How’s that? I dream that she wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests. That she wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity. Or just fuck her and leave her. If you were thinking of getting your dick up this woman, Micky, or whoever the fuck you really are, I’d forget it. You’re better off sticking with me.”

I let that one soak out in silence for a moment. She flexed a smile at me.

“This the kind of thing you wanted to hear?”

I shrugged. “It’ll do to be going on with. Did you push her into the sex? To get access?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I can probably find out from her.”

“You’re assuming she’ll be back.” Another smile, more teeth this time. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

And on like that. We snapped and snarled at each other for a while longer, but beneath the weight of post-coital chemistry, none of it came to anything. In the end, I gave up and sat on the outer edge of the bed, staring out towards the main room and the Hotei-lit panels on the floor. A few minutes later, I felt her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“Yeah? For what?”

“I just realised I asked for this. I mean, I asked you what you were thinking about. If I didn’t want to know, why ask, right?”

“There is that.”

“It’s just.” She hesitated. “Listen, Micky, I’m getting sleepy here. And I lied back there, I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back. I don’t know if I’ll wake up tomorrow morning or not. That’s enough to make anyone edgy, right?”

I stared at the orange stained floor in the other room. A momentary sense of vertigo came and went. I cleared my throat.

“There’s always the amphetamine cola,” I said roughly.

“No. Sooner or later, I’ll have to sleep. It might as well be now. I’m tired, and worse than that I’m happy and relaxed. Feels like if I’ve got to go, this’ll do. It’s only chemical, I know, but I can’t hold out against it forever. And I think I will be back. Something’s telling me that. But right now I don’t know when, and I don’t know where I’m going. And that scares me. Could you.” Another pause. I heard the click as she swallowed in the quiet. “Would you mind holding me while I go under?”

Orange moonlight on a worn and darkened floor.

I reached back for her hand.

Like most of the combat custom I’d ever worn, the Eishundo sleeve came fitted with an internal wake-up. At the hour I’d fixed in my head, whatever dreams I was having coalesced into the rising rim of a tropical sun over quiet waters. Scent of fruit and coffee drifting from somewhere unseen and the cheerful murmur of voices off. The cool of sand at early morning under my naked feet, and a faint but persistent breeze in my face. Sound of breakers Vchira Beach? Already?

My hands were balled in the pockets of faded surfslacks, traces of sand in the lining of the pockets that—

The sense impressions vanished abruptly as I woke up. No coffee, and no beach to drink it on. No sand under my feet or my uncurling fingers.

There was sunlight, but it was altogether thinner than in the wake-up imaging, strained colourlessly through the windows in the other room and into a grey, downward pressing quiet.

I turned over gingerly and looked at the face of the woman sleeping next to me. She didn’t move. I remembered the fear in Nadia Makita’s eyes the night before as she let herself slide fractions at a time into sleep.

Increments of consciousness slipping like taut rope through her hands and away, and then stopped as she flinched and blinked herself awake again.

And then the moment, abrupt and unawaited, when she let go completely and didn’t come back. Now I lay and watched the peace on her face as she slept, and it didn’t help.

I slid out of bed and dressed quietly in the other room. I didn’t want to be around when she woke up.

I certainly didn’t want to wake her myself.

Dig 301 shaded into existence opposite me and opened her mouth.

Combat neurachem got there first. I made a slicing gesture across my own throat and jerked a thumb back at the bedroom. Swept up my jacket from the back of a chair, shouldered my way into it and nodded at the door.

“Outside,” I murmured.

Outside, the day was shaping up better than its first impressions. The sun was wintry, but you could get warm if you stood in its rays directly and the cloud cover was starting to break up. Daikoku stood like the ghost of a scimitar blade to the south west and there was a column of specks circling slowly out over the ocean, ripwings at a guess. Down below, a couple of vessels were visible at the limits of my unaided vision. Tekitomura made a backdrop mutter in the still air. I yawned and looked at the amphetamine cola in my hand, then tucked it into my jacket. I was as awake as I wanted to be right now.

“So what did you want?” I asked the construct beside me.

“I thought you would like to know that the site has visitors.”

The neurachem slammed on line. Time turned to sludge around me as the Eishundo sleeve went to combat aware. I was staring sideways in disbelief at Dig 301 when the first blast cut past me. I saw the flare of disrupted air where it came through the construct’s projected presence and then I was spinning away sideways as my jacket caught fire.

“Motherfu—”

No gun, no knife. I’d left them both inside. No time to reach the door, and Envoy instinct kicked me away from it anyway. Later, I’d realise what the situational intuition already knew—going back inside was a bolthole suicide. Jacket still in flames, I tumbled into the cover of the cabin wall.

The blaster beam flashed again, nowhere near me. They were firing at Dig 301 again, misreading her for a solid human target.

Not exactly ninja-grade combat skills, flashed through my mind. These guys are the local hired help.

Yeah but they have guns and you don’t.

Time to change arenas.

Fire-retardant material in my jacket had the flames down to smoke and heat across my ribs. The scorched fibres oozed damping polymer. I drew one hard breath and sprinted.

Yells behind me, boiling instantly from disbelief to anger. Maybe they thought they’d taken me down with the first shot, maybe they just weren’t all that bright. It took them a pair of seconds to start shooting. By then I was almost to the next cabin. Blaster fire crackled in my ears. Heat flared close to my hip and my flesh cringed. I flinched sideways, got the cabin at my back and scanned the ground ahead.

Three more cabins, gathered in a rough arc on the ground quarried out by the original archaeologues. Beyond them, the eyrie lifted off into the sky from massive cantilevered supports, like some vast premillennial rocket poised for launch. I hadn’t been inside the day before, there was altogether too much abrupt space underfoot and a straight drop five hundred metres to the slanted mountainside below. But I knew from previous experience what the alien perspectives of Martian architecture could do to human perceptions, and I knew the Envoy conditioning would hold up.

Local hired help. Hold that thought.

They’d come in after me hesitantly at best, confused by the dizzying swoop of the interior, maybe even spiked with a little superstitious dread if

I was lucky. They’d be off balance, they’d be afraid.

They’d make mistakes.

Which made the eyrie a perfect killing ground.

I bolted across the remaining open space, slipped between two of the cabins and made for the nearest outcropping of Martian alloy, where it rose out of the rock like a tree root five metres thick. The archaeologues had left a set of metal steps bolted into the ground beside it. I took them three at a time and stepped onto the outcropping, boots slithering on alloy the colour of bruises. I steadied myself against a bas-relief technoglyph facing that formed the side of the closest cantilever support as it extended outward into the air. The support was at least ten metres high, but a couple of metres to my left there was a ladder epoxied to the bas-relief surface. I grabbed a rung and started climbing.

More shouts from back among the cabins. No shooting. It sounded as if they were checking corners, but I didn’t have the time to crank up the neurachem and make sure. Sweat jumped from my hands as the ladder creaked and shifted under my weight. The epoxy hadn’t taken well to the Martian alloy. I doubled my speed, reached the top and swung off with a tiny grunt of relief. Then I lay flat on top of the cantilever support, breathing and listening. Neurachem brought me the sounds of a badly organised search thrashing about below. Someone was trying to shoot the lock off one of the cabins. I stared up at the sky and thought about it for a moment.

“Dig? You there?” Voice a murmur.

“I am in communication range, yes.” The construct’s words seemed to come out of the air beside my ear. “You need speak no louder than you are. I assume from the situational context you do not wish me to become visible in your vicinity.”

“You assume right. What I would like you to do is, on my command, become visible inside one of the locked-up cabins down there. Better yet, more than one if you can handle multiple projections. Can you do that?”

“I am enabled for one-to-one interaction up to and including every member of the original Dig 301 team at any given time, plus a guest potential of seven.” It was hard to tell at this volume, but there seemed to be a trace of amusement in the construct’s voice. “This gives me a total capacity of sixty-two separate representations.”

“Yeah, well, three or four should do for now.” I rolled with painstaking care onto my front. “And, listen, can you project as me?”

“No. I can choose among an index of personality projections, but I am not able to alter them in any way.”

“You have any males?”

“Yes, though fewer options than—”

“Alright, that’s fine. Just choose a few out of the index that look like me. Male, about my build.”

“When do you wish this to commence?”

I got my hands positioned under me.

“Now.”

“Commencing.”

It took a couple of seconds, and then chaos erupted among the cabins below. Blasterfire crackled back and forth, punctuated with shouts of warning and the sound of running feet. Fifteen metres above it all, I pushed hard with both hands, came up in a crouch and then exploded into the sprint.

The cantilever arm ran out fifty-odd metres over empty space, then buried itself seamlessly in the main body of the eyrie. Wide oval entrances gaped at the join. The dig team had attempted to attach a safety rail along the top of the arm, but as with the ladder, the epoxy hadn’t done well over time. In places the cabling had torn loose and now hung over the sides, elsewhere it was simply gone. I grimaced and narrowed focus to the broad flange at the end where the arm joined the main structure. Held the sprint.

Neurachem reeled in a voice shouting above the others—

“—pid motherfuckers, cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fucking fire! Up there, he’s up there!”

Ominous quiet. I put on desperate increments of speed. Then the air was ripped through with blast beams. I skidded, nearly went over a gap in the rail. Flung myself forward again.

Dig 301 at my ear, thunderous under neurachem amp.

“Portions of this site are currently considered unsafe—”

My own wordless snarl.

Blast heat at my back and the stink of ionised air.

The new voice below again, neurachemmed in close. “Fucking give me that, will you. I’ll show you how to—”

I threw myself sideways across the flange. The blast I knew was coming cut a scorching pain across my back and shoulder. Pretty sharp shooting at that range with a weapon that clumsy. I went down, rolled in approved fashion, came up and dived for the nearest oval opening.

Blasterfire chased me inside.

It took them nearly half an hour to come in after me.

Holed up in the swooping Martian architecture, I strained with the neurachem and followed the argument as best I could. I couldn’t find a vantage point this low in the structure that would give me a view of the outside—fucking Martian builders—but peculiar funnelling effects in the eyrie’s internal structure brought me the sound of voices in gusts. The gist of what was said wasn’t hard to sort out. The hired help wanted to pack up and go home, their leader wanted my head on a stick.

You couldn’t blame him. In his place, I wouldn’t have been any different.

You don’t go back to the yakuza with half a contract fulfilled. And you certainly don’t turn your back on an Envoy. He knew that better than anyone there.

He sounded younger than I’d expected.

“—believe you’re fucking scared of this place. For Christ’s sake, you all grew up just down the hill. It’s only a fucking ruin.”

I glanced around at the billowing curves and hollows, felt the gentle but insistent way their lines sucked focus upward until your eyes started to ache. Hard morning light fell in from unseen vents overhead, but somehow on the way down it softened and changed. The clouded bluish alloy surfaces seemed to suck it in and the reflected light that came back was oddly muted. Below the mezzanine level I’d climbed to, patches of gloom alternated with gashes and holes in flooring where no sane human architect would have put them. A long way below that, the mountainside showed grey rock and sparse vegetation.

Only a ruin. Right.

He was younger than I’d expected.

For the first time, I started to wonder constructively exactly how young.

At an absolute minimum, he was certainly short a couple of formative experiences I’d had around Martian artefacts.

“Look, he’s not even fucking armed.”

I pitched my voice to carry outside.

“Boy, Kovacs! You’re so fucking confident, why don’t you come in and get me yourself?”

Sudden silence. Some muttering. I thought I caught a muffled guffaw from one of the locals. Then his voice, raised to match mine.

“That’s good eavesdropping gear they fitted you with.”

“Isn’t it.”

“You planning to give us a fight, or just listen in and shout cheap abuse?”

I grinned. “Just trying to be helpful. But you can have a fight if you want it—just come on in. Bring the hired help too, if you must.”

“I’ve got a better idea. How about I let my hired help run an open-all orifices train on your travelling companion, as long as it takes you to come out? You could use your neurachem to listen in on that as well if you like. Although, to be honest, the sound’ll probably carry enough without. They’re enthusiastic, these boys.”

The fury spiked up through me, too fast for rational thought. Muscles in my face skipped and juddered, and the frame of the Eishundo sleeve cabled rigid. For two sluggish heartbeats, he had me. Then the Envoy systems came soaking coldly through the emotion, bleaching it back out for assessment.

He isn’t going to do that. If Tanaseda traced you through Oshima and the Slipins, it’s because he knows she’s implicated in Yukio Hirayasu’s death. And if he knows that, he’ll want her intact. Tanaseda is old school and he’s promised an old-school execution. He isn’t going to want damaged goods.

And besides, this is you we’re talking about. You know what you’re capable of and it isn’t this.

I was younger then. Now. I am. I wrestled the concept in my head. Out there. I’m younger out there. There’s no telling—

Yes there is. This is Envoy bluff and you know it, you’ve used it enough yourself.

“Nothing to say about that?”

“We both know you won’t do it, Kovacs. We both know who you’re working for.”

This time the pause before he called back was barely noticeable. Good recovery, very impressive.

“You seem remarkably well informed for a man on the run.”

“It’s my training.”

“Soak up the local colour, huh?”

Virginia Vidaura’s words at Envoy induction, a subjective century ago. I wondered how long ago she’d said it to him.

“Something like that.”

“Tell me something, man, ‘cause I’d genuinely like to know. With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living? As a career move, I got to say it puzzles me.”

A cold knowledge crept up through me as I listened. I grimaced and shifted my position slightly. Said nothing.

“Serendipity, right? It’s Serendipity?”

“Well, I have got another name,” I shouted back. “But some fuckhead stole it. Until I get it back, Serendipity’s fine.”

“Maybe you won’t get it back.”

“Nah, it’s good of you to worry, but I know the fuckhead in question. He isn’t going to be a problem for much longer.”

The twitch was tiny, barely a missed beat. Only the Envoy sense picked it up, the anger, shut down as rapidly as it flared.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, like I said. Real fuckhead. Strictly a short-lived thing.”

“That sounds like overconfidence to me.” His voice had changed fractionally. Somewhere in there, I’d stung him. “Maybe you don’t know this guy as well as you like to think.”

I barked a laugh. “Are you kidding? I taught him every nicking thing he knows. Without me—”

And there. The figure I’d known was coming. The one I couldn’t listen for with neurachem while I traded veiled insults with the voice outside. A crouched, black-clad form sliding in through the opening five metres under me, some kind of spec-ops eye-mask-and-sensor gear turning the head insectile and inhuman. Thermographic imaging, sonic locater, motion alert, at a probable minimum—

I was already falling. Pushed off from the ledge, boot-heels aligned to hit the neck below the masked head and snap it.

Something in the headgear warned him. He jumped sideways, looking up, twisting the blaster towards me. Beneath the mask, his mouth jerked open to yell. The blast cut through air I’d just dropped out of. I hit the floor crouched, a handsbreadth off his right elbow. Blocked the swing of the blaster barrel as it came round. The yell came out of his mouth, shivery with the shock. I struck upward into his throat with the blade of one hand and the sound choked to retching. He staggered. I straightened, went after him and chopped again.

There were two more of them.

Framed in the opening, side by side. The only thing that saved me was their incompetence. As the lead commando dropped strangling to death at my feet, either one could have shot me—instead, they both tried at the same time and tangled. I sprinted directly at them.

There are worlds I’ve been where you can take down a man with a knife at ten metres and claim it as self defence. The legal argument is that it doesn’t take very long to close that gap.

That much is true.

If you really know what you’re doing, you don’t even need the knife.

This was five metres or less. I got in a flurry of blows, stamping down at shin and instep, blocked weapons however I could, hooking an elbow round hard into a face. A blaster came loose and I fielded it. Triggered it in a savage close-quarters arc.

Muffled shrieks and a short-lived explosion of blood as flesh seared open and then cauterised. Steam wisped, and their bodies tumbled away from me. I had time for a hard breath, a glance down at the weapon in my hands—piece of shit Szeged Incandess—and then another blaster beam flared off the alloy surface beside my head. They were coming in force.

With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living?

Just fucking incompetent, I guess.

I backed up. Someone poked a head into the oval opening and I chased them away with a barely aimed burst of fire.

And too fucking fascinated with yourself for your own good.

I grabbed a projection one handed and hauled myself up, hooking my legs onto the wide, spiralling ramp that led back to my initial hiding place on the mezzanine. The Eishundo sleeve’s gekko grip failed on the alloy.

I slipped, grabbed again in vain, and fell. Two new commandos burst through a gap to the left of the one I was covering. I fired randomly and low with the Szeged, trying to get back up. The beam chopped a foot off the commando on the right. She screamed and stumbled, clutched at her injured leg, toppled gracelessly and fell through a gash in the floor. Her second scream floated back up through the gap.

I came up off the ground and flung myself at her companion.

It was a clumsy fight, both of us hampered by the weapons we held. I lunged with the butt of the Szeged, he blocked and tried to level his own blaster. I smashed it aside and kicked at a knee. He turned the blow with a shin-kick of his own. I got the Szeged butt under his chin and rammed upward. He dropped his weapon and punched me hard simultaneously in the side of the throat and the groin. I reeled back, hung on somehow to the Szeged and suddenly had the distance to use it. Proximity sense screamed a warning at me through the pain. The commando ripped out a sidearm and pointed it. I flinched aside, ignoring the pain and the proximity warning in my head, levelled the blaster.

Sharp splatter from the gun in the commando’s hand. The cold wrap of a stunblast.

My hand spasmed open and the Szeged clattered away somewhere.

I staggered backwards and the floor vanished under my feet.

—fucking Martian builders—

I dropped out of the eyrie like a bomb, and fell wingless away from the rapidly contracting iris of my own consciousness.

EIGHTEEN

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.”

It was like a mantra, like an incantation, and someone seemed to have been singing it to me for hours. I wasn’t sure if I could have disobeyed it anyway—my left arm was an icy branch of numbness from fist to shoulder and my eyes seemed gummed shut. My shoulder felt wrenched, maybe dislocated. Elsewhere, my body throbbed with the more general ache of a stunblast hangover. I was cold everywhere.

“Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t—”

“I heard you the first time, Dig.” My throat felt clogged. I coughed and an alarming dizziness swung through me. “Where am I?”

A brief hesitation. “Professor Serendipity, perhaps that information would be better dealt with later. Don’t open your left hand.”

“Yeah, got it. Left hand, don’t open it. Is it fucked?”

“No,” said the construct reluctantly. “Apparently not. But it is the only thing holding you up.”

Shock, like a stake in the chest. Then the rolling wave of false calm as the conditioning kicked in. Envoys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing—waking up in unexpected places is part of the brief. You don’t panic, you just gather data and deal with the situation. I swallowed hard.

“I see.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred metres of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.

The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-grey alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.

“What’s going on, Dig?” I croaked.

“As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.”

“Recovery bay?” I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. “So how does that work?”

“We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—”

“Alright.” I stared grimly up at my closed fist. “How long have I been out?”

“Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high altitude, high-risk environments.”

No shit.

How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me.

They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realisation of the fall. Grabbing at something half-seen as the stun blast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.

A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.

“Where are the others?”

“They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.”

“So they think I fell all the way.”

“It appears so. The man you referred to as Kovacs has detailed some of his employees to begin a search at the base of the mountain. I understand they will try to recover your body along with that of the woman you mutilated in the firefight.”

“And Sylvie? My colleague?”

“They have taken her with them. I have recorded footage of—”

“Not right now.” I cleared my throat, noticing for the first time how parched it felt. “Look, you said there are openings. Ways back into the eyrie from here. Where’s the nearest?”

“Behind the triflex downspire to your left, there is an entry port of ninety-three centimetres diameter.”

I craned my neck and spotted what I assumed Dig 301 was talking about. The downspire looked very much like a two-metre inverted witch’s hat that massive fists had crumpled badly in three different places. It was surfaced in uneven bluish facets that caught the shadowed light beneath the eyrie and gleamed as if wet. The lowest deformation brought its tip almost horizontal and offered a saddle of sorts that I thought I might be able to cling to. It was less than two metres from where I hung.

Easy. Nothing to it.

If you can make the jump with one arm crippled, that is.

If your trick hand grips better on Martian alloy than it did an hour ago upstairs.

I reached up with my right arm and took hold of the loop of cable, close to my other hand. Very gently, I took up the tension and began to lift myself on the new grip. My left arm twinged as the weight came off it, and a jagged flash of heat spiked through the numbness. My shoulder creaked.

The heat branched out across abused ligaments and started turning into something resembling pain. I tried to flex my left hand, but got nothing outside from a sparking sensation in the fingers. The pain in my shoulder swelled and began to soak down through the muscles of the arm. It felt as if, when it finally got going, it was going to hurt a lot.

I tried again with the fingers of my left hand. This time the sparking gave way to a bone-deep, pulsing ache that brought tears squirting into my eyes. The fingers would not respond. My grip was welded in place.

“Do you wish me to alert emergency services?”

Emergency services: the Tekitomura police, closely followed by deCom security with tidings of Kurumaya’s displeasure, tipped-off local yakuza with the new me at their grinning head and who knew, maybe even the Knights of the New Revelation, if they could afford the police bribes and had been keeping up on current events.

“Thanks,” I said weakly. “I think I’ll manage.”

I glanced up at my clamped left hand, back at the triflex downspire, down at the drop. I drew a long hard breath. Then, slowly, I worked my right hand along the cable until it was touching its locked-up mate.

Another breath and I hinged my body upward from the waist. Barely recovered nerve tissue in my stomach muscles sputtered protest. I hooked with my right foot, missed, flailed and hooked again. My ankle lodged over the cable. More weight came off my left arm. The pain began in earnest, racking explosions through the joints and down the muscles.

One more breath, one more glance d—

No, don’t fucking look down.

One more breath, teeth gritted.

Then I began, with thumb and forefinger, to unhinge my paralysed fingers one at a time from the cable.

I left the swooping bluish gloom of the eyrie’s interior half an hour later, still on the edge of a persistent manic giggle. The adrenalin humour stayed with me all the way along the cantilever arm, down the shaky archaeologue ladder—not easy with one arm barely functional—then the steps. I hit solid ground still smirking stupidly, and picked my way between the cabins with ingrained caution and tiny explosive snorts of hilarity. Even when I got back to the cabin we’d used, even inside and staring at the empty bed I’d left Sylvie in, I could feel the trace of the comedown grin twitching on and off my lips and the laughter still bubbled faintly in my stomach.

It had been a close thing.

Ungripping my fingers from the cable hadn’t been much fun, but compared with the rest of the escapade, it was a joy. Once released, my left arm dropped and hung at the end of a shoulder socket that ached like a bad tooth. It was as much use to me as a dead weight slung around my neck. A sustained minute of cursing before I could bring myself to then unsling my right foot, swing free by my right hand and use the momentum to make an ungainly leap sideways at the downspire. I grabbed, clawed, found that the Martians for once had built in a material that offered something approaching decent friction and clamped myself panting into the saddle at the bottom. I stayed like that for a good ten minutes, cheek pressed to the cold alloy.

Careful exploratory leaning and peering showed me the floor hatch Dig 301 had promised, within grasping distance if I stood up on the tip of the downspire. I flexed my left arm, got some response above the elbow and reckoned it might serve, if nothing else, as a wedge in the hatch. From that position, I could probably lever my legs up and inside.

Another ten minutes and I was sweatily ready to try.

A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.

Nothing to it.

Eventually, I got up and made my way out.

In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared, there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder.

The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.

There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.

On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia.

Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.

In too much of a hurry.

Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?

I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.

I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.

I wondered what he would do.

I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.

“Dig?”

She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.

“Professor Serendipity?”

“You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?”

“Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic metres of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—”

“Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.”

“Commencing.”

I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.

“And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.”

He had a good body.

I skipped about in the footage for the best shots, got one as the intruders came up the mountain path towards the cabin. Froze it on him and stared for a while. He had some of the bulk you expect from battlefield custom, but there was a lilt to it, a way of stepping and standing that leaned more towards Total Body theatre than combat. Face a smooth blend of more racial variants than you’d usually get on Harlan’s World. Custom cultured, then. Gene codes bought in from offworld. Skin tanned the colour of worn amber, eyes a startling blue. Broad, protruding cheekbones, a wide, full-lipped mouth and long, crinkled black hair bound back with a static braid. Very pretty.

And very pricey, even for the yakuza.

I quelled the faint scratching of disquiet and got Dig 301 to pan about a bit among the intruders. Another figure caught my eye. Tall and powerful, rainbow-maned. The site microcams yanked in a close-up of steel lensed eyes and subcutaneous circuitry in a grim, pale face.

Anton.

Anton and at least a couple of slim wincefish types who preceded him up the path with the loose, in-step co-ordination of deCom operational pitch.

One of them was the woman whose foot I’d shot off in the eyrie. Two, no three, more came behind the command head, standing out clearly from the rest of the party now that I was looking for that characteristic scattered but meshed pattern.

Somewhere in me, a faint grey sense of loss readied itself for recognition at the sight.

Anton and the Skull Gang

Kovacs had brought his New Hok hunting dogs back with him.

I thought back to the confusion of the firelight amidst the cabins and the eyrie, and it made some more sense. A boatload of yakuza enforcers and a deCom crew, mingled and getting in each other’s way. Very poor logistics for an Envoy. No way I would have made that mistake at his age.

What are you talking about? You just did make that mistake at his age. That’s you out there.

A faint shiver coiled down my spine.

“Dig, move it up to the bedroom again. Where they pull her out.”

The coil jumped and shimmered. The woman with the tangled hyper wired hair blinked awake among twisted sheets. The crash of gunfire outside had woken her. Eyes wide as she registered what it was. Then the door burst open and the room filled with bulky forms brandishing hardware and yelling. When they saw what they had, the shouting powered down to chuckles. Weapons were put up and someone reached for her.

She punched him in the face. A brief struggle flared and guttered out as weight of numbers squashed her speed reflexes. Sheets torn away, efficient disabling blows administered to thigh and solar plexus. While she wheezed on the floor, one grinning thug grabbed at a breast, groped between her legs and made pumped-hip rutting motions over her. A couple of his companions laughed.

I was seeing it for the second time. Still, the rage leapt up through me like flames. In my palms, the gekko spines sweated awake.

A second enforcer appeared in the doorway, saw what was going on and bellowed in furious Japanese. The thug leapt away from the woman on the floor. He made a nervous bow, a stammered apology. The newcomer stepped in close and backhanded the man three times with shattering force. The thug cowered against the wall. More yelling from the newcomer.

Amidst some of the more colourful insults I’d ever heard in Japanese, he was telling someone to bring clothes for the captive.

By the time Kovacs got back from overseeing the hunt for himself, they had her dressed and seated on a chair in the centre of the cabin’s main living space. Her hands rested in her lap, wrists bound neatly, one over the other with a restraint patch you couldn’t see. The yakuza stood at a careful distance from her, weapons still out. The would-be romantic sulked in a corner, disarmed, one side of his mouth swollen, upper lip split. Kovacs’ eyes flickered over the damage and he turned to the enforcer at his side. A muttered exchange the microcams were not amped to pick up. He nodded, looked again at the woman before him. I read a curious hesitation in his stance.

Then he turned back to the cabin door.

“Anton, you want to come in here?”

The Skull Gang command head stepped into the room. When the woman saw him, her mouth twisted.

“You fucking sellout piece of shit.”

Anton’s lip curled, but he said nothing.

“You know each other, I believe.” But there was a faint question in Kovacs’ voice and he was still watching the woman before him.

Sylvie tipped her gaze at him. “Yeah, I know this asshole. And? Got something to do with you, has it, fuckhead?”

He stared at her, and I tensed in my chair. This segment was first time through for me, and I didn’t know what he’d do. What would I have done at that age? No, scratch that. What was I about to do at that age? My mind fled back through the silted-up decades of violence and rage, trying to anticipate.

But he only smiled.

“No, Mistress Oshima. It has nothing to do with me any more. You are a package I have to deliver in good condition, that’s all.”

Someone muttered, someone else guffawed. Still cranked tight, my neurachem hearing caught a crude joke about packages. In the coil, my younger self paused. His eyes flickered to the man with the broken lip.

“You. Come here.”

The enforcer didn’t want to. You could see it in his stance. But he was yakuza, and in the end it’s all face with them. He straightened up, met Kovacs’ eyes and stepped forward with a filed-tooth sneer. Kovacs looked back at him neutrally and nodded.

“Show me your right hand.”

The yakuza tipped his head to one side, gaze still locked on Kovacs’ eyes. It was a gesture of pure insolence. He flipped up his hand, extended fingers making it a loosely bent blade. He inclined his head again, the other way, still staring deep into this tani piece of shit’s eyes.

Kovacs moved like whiplash on a broken trawler cable.

He snatched the offered hand at the wrist and twisted downward, blocking the other man’s response options with his body. He held the captured arm straight out and his other hand arced over the wrestling lock of both bodies, blaster pointed. A beam flared and sizzled.

The enforcer shrieked as his hand went up in flames. The blaster must have been powered down—most beam weapons will take a limb clean off, vaporised across the width of the blast. This one had only burnt away skin and flesh to the bone and tendon. Kovacs held the man a moment longer, then turned him loose with an elbow-strike cuff across the side of the head. The enforcer collapsed across the floor with his scorched hand clamped under his armpit and his trousers visibly stained. He was weeping uncontrollably.

Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.

“Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a god to you. Is that clear?”

Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.

“Mistress Oshima. If you’d like to follow me, please.”

She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and followed him out of the cabin. The yakuza filed after them, leaving their captain and the man on the floor. The captain stared at his injured enforcer for a moment, then booted him savagely in the ribs, spat on him and stalked out.

Outside, they’d loaded the three men I’d killed in the eyrie onto a fold down grav stretcher rack. The yakuza captain detailed a man to drive it, then took point ahead of a protective phalanx around Kovacs and Sylvie.

Beside and behind the stretcher rack, Anton and the four remaining members of the Skull Gang formed up into a lax rearguard. Dig’s outdoor microcams followed the little procession out of sight along the path down to Tekitomura.

Stumbling fifty metres behind them all, still nursing his ruined and as yet untreated hand, came the disgraced enforcer who had dared to touch Sylvie Oshima.

I watched him go, trying to make sense of it.

Trying to make it fit.

I was still trying when Dig 301 asked if I was finished, if wanted to see something else. I told her no, absently. In my head, Envoy intuition was already doing what needed to be done.

Setting fire to my preconceptions and burning them to the ground.

NINETEEN

The lights were all out in Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six when I got there, but in a unit half a dozen bays down on the right, the upper level windows glowed fitfully, as if the place was on fire inside. There was a frenetic hybrid Reef Dive/Neojunk rhythm blasting out into the night, even through the cranked down loading bay shutter, and three thickset figures stood around outside in dark coats, breathing steam and flapping their arms against the cold. Plex Kohei might have the floorspace to throw big dance parties, but it didn’t look as if he could afford machine security on the door. This was going to be easier than I’d expected.

Always assuming Plex was actually there.

Are you kidding me? Isa’s fifteen-year-old Millsport-accented scorn down the line when I phoned her late that afternoon. Of course he’ll be in. What day is it?

Uh. I estimated. Friday?

Right, Friday. So what do the local yokels do up there on a Friday?

Fuck should I know, Isa? And don’t be such a metrosnob.

Uh, Friday? Hello? Fishing community? Ebisu night?

He’s having a party.

He’s cranking some credit out of cheap floorspace and good take connections, is what he’s doing, she drawled. All those warehouses. All those family friends in the yak.

Don’t suppose you’d know which warehouse exactly.

Stupid question. Picking my way through the fractal street-planning of the warehouse district hadn’t been my idea of fun, but once I hit Belacotton Kohei section, it hadn’t been hard to find my way to the party—you could hear the music across half a dozen alleys in every direction.

Don’t suppose I would. Isa yawned down the line. I guessed she’d not been out of bed that long. Say, Kovacs. You been pissing people off up there?

No. Why?

Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t really be telling you this for nothing. But seeing as how we go back.

I stifled a grin. Isa and I went back all of a year and a half. When you’re fifteen I guess that’s a long time.

Yeah?

Yeah, been a lot of big heat down here, asking after you. Paying big for answers, too. So if you’re not already, I’d start looking over the shoulder of that deep-voiced new sleeve you’ve got yourself there.

I frowned and thought about it. What kind of big heat?

If I knew that, you’d have to pay me for it. But as it happens, I don’t. Only players talked to me were bent Millsport PD, and them you can buy for the price of an Angel Wharf blowjob. Anybody could have sent them.

And I don’t suppose you told them anything about me.

Don’t suppose I did. You planning on soaking up this line much longer, Kovacs?

Only, I’m not like you. I have a social life.

No, I’m gone. Thanks for the newsflash, Isa.

She grunted. My clit-tingling pleasure. You stay in one piece, maybe we get to do some more business I can charge you for.

I pressed the sealseam of my newly acquired coat closed to the collar, flexed my hands inside the black polalloy gloves—spike of brief agony from the left—and poured gangster attitude into my stride as I came round the curve of the alley. Think Yukio Hirayasu at his most youthfully arrogant. Ignore the fact the coat wasn’t hand-tailored—straight-to-street off-the-rack branded was the best I could do at short notice, a garment the real Hirayasu wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But it was a rich matt black to match the spray-on gloves and, in this light, it should pass. Envoy deceit would do the rest.

I’d thought briefly about crashing Plex’s party the hard way. Going in heavy against the door, or maybe scaling the back of the warehouse and cracking a skylight entry. But my left arm was still a single throbbing ache from fingertip to neck and I didn’t know how far I could trust it to do what I wanted in a critical situation.

The door detail saw me coming and drew together. Neurachem vision calibrated them for me at distance—cheap, wharf-front muscle, maybe some very basic combat augmentation in the way they moved. One of them had a tactical marine tattoo across his cheek, but that could have been a knock-off, courtesy of some parlour with army surplus software.

Or, like a lot of tacs, he could just have fallen on post-demob hard times.

Downsizing. The universal catch-all and catechism on Harlan’s World these days. Nothing was more sacred than cost cutting, and even the military weren’t entirely safe.

“Hold it, sam.”

It was the one with the tattoo. I cut him a withering glance. Halted, barely.

“I have an appointment with Plex Kohei. I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”

“Appointment?” His gaze lifted and slipped left, checking a retinal guest list. “Not tonight you don’t. Man’s busy.”

I let my eyes widen, built the volcanic pressure of fury the way I’d seen it from the yak captain in Dig 301’s footage.

“Do you know who I am?” I barked.

The tattooed doorman shrugged. “I know I don’t see your face on this list. And round here, that means you don’t get in.”

At my side, the others were looking me up and down with professional interest. Seeing what they could break easily. I fought down the impulse to take up a fighting stance and eyed them with mannered disdain instead.

Launched the bluff.

“Very well. You will please inform your employer that you have turned Yukio Hirayasu from his door, and that thanks to your diligence in this matter, he will now speak to me in sempai Tanaseda’s presence tomorrow morning, unadvised and thus unprepared.”

Gazes flew back and forth between the three of them. It was the names, the whiff of authentic yakuza clout. The spokesman hesitated. I turned away. Was only midway through the motion when he made up his mind, and broke.

“Alright. Hirayasu-san. Just one moment please.”

The great thing about organised crime is the level of fear it likes to maintain among its minions and those who associate with them. Thug hierarchy. You can see the same pattern on any of a dozen different worlds—the Hun Home triads, Adoracion’s familias vigilantes, the Provo Crews on Nkrumah’s Land. Regional variations, but they all sow the same crop of respect through terror of retribution. And all reap the same harvest of stunted initiative in the ranks. No one wants to take an independent decision, when independent action runs the risk of reinterpretation as a lack of respect. Shit like that can get you Really Dead.

Better by far, to fall back on hierarchy. The doorman dug out his phone and punched up his boss.

“Listen, Plex, we’ve—”

He listened a moment himself, face immobile. Angry insect sounds from the phone. I didn’t need neurachem to work out what was being said.

“Uh, yeah, I know you said that, man. But I’ve got Yukio Hirayasu out here wanting a word, and I—”

Another break, but this time the doorkeep seemed happier. He nodded a couple of times, described me and what I’d just said. At the other end of the line, I could hear Plex dithering. I gave it a couple of moments, then snapped my fingers impatiently and gestured for the phone. The doorman caved in and handed it over. I mustered Hirayasu’s speech patterns from memory a couple of months old, coloured in what I didn’t know with standard Millsport gangster idiom.

“Plex.” Grim impatience.

“Uh. Yukio? That really you?”

I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. “No, I’m a fucking ledgedust dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.”

“Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were gone.”

“Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”

“Tana—” Plex swallowed audibly. “Is Tanaseda here?”

“Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.”

“All over what?”

“All over what?”

I cranked the yelp again. “What do you fucking think?”

I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.

“I thought they—”

“Are you going to fucking let me in or what?”

The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.

Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene—translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.

A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood warm. The music got even louder.

We forged through the tightly packed dancespace without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissed-out vacant. The take scene is pretty laid back wherever you go on Harlan’s World—careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amidst incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody wants them outside of the military.

A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirror wood panelling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.

I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automould bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful, wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had got them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dancespace image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognisable enough to dance to.

Or whatever.

“Hey Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.” Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. “That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom grown?”

I nodded at his playmates. “Get rid of them.”

“Uh, sure.” He turned back to the automould and clapped his hands.

“Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.”

They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.

“Yeah, him too.”

The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at

Plex, who was moving towards a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the side wall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous, take and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.

“Uh, you want a pipe, man?”

“Plex.” I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. “Just what the fuck is going on?”

He flinched. Stuttered.

“I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—”

“Fuck that, Plex. Talk to me.”

“Look, man, it’s not my fault.” His tone worked towards aggrieved. “Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that kaikyo shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I know bio tech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was fucked up.”

My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio. Kaikyo—a strait, a stolen goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.

“Where’d they take her?” I asked quietly.

It wasn’t Yukio’s tone any more but I wasn’t going to get much further as Yukio anyway. I didn’t know enough to sustain the lie in the face of Plex’s lifelong acquaintance.

“Took her to Millsport, I guess.” He was building himself a pipe, maybe to balance out the take blur. “I mean, Yukio, has Tanaseda really not—”

“Where in Millsport?”

Then he got it. I saw the knowledge soak through him, and he reached suddenly under the module’s upper shelf. Maybe he had some neurachem wiring somewhere in that pale, aristocratic body he wore, but for him it would have been little more than an accessory. And the chemicals slowed him down so much it was laughable.

I let him get a hand on the gun, let him get it halfway clear of the shelf it was webbed under. Then I kicked his hand away, knocked him back onto the automould with a backfist and stamped down on the shelf. Ornate glassware splintered, the paper parcels flew and the shelf cracked across.

The gun fell out on the floor. Looked like a compact shard blaster, big brother to the GS Rapsodia under my coat. I scooped it up and turned in time to catch Plex scrambling for some kind of wall alarm.

“Don’t.”

He froze, staring hypnotised at the gun.

“Sit down. Over there.”

He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.

Fucking set fire to it or something.

“Who.” His mouth worked. “Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.”

I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.

“Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.”

His face creased. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.

“Fuck. Kovacs?”

“Good guess.” I put the stack away again. “The original. Accept no imitations. Now, unless you want to be sharing a pocket with your boyhood pal here, I suggest you go on answering my questions the way you were when you thought I was him.”

“But, you’re.” He shook his head. “You’re never going to get away with this, Kovacs. They’ve got. They’ve got you looking for you, man.”

“I know. They must be desperate, right?”

“It isn’t funny, man. He’s fucking psychotic. They’re still counting the bodies he left in Drava. They’re really dead. Stacks gone, the works.”

I felt a brief spike of shock, but it was almost distant. Behind it there was the grim chill that had come with my sight of Anton and the Skull Gang in Dig 301’s recorded footage. Kovacs had gone to New Hok and he’d done the groundwork with Envoy intensity. He’d brought back what he needed. Corollary. What he couldn’t use he’d left in smoking ruin behind him.

“So who’d he kill, Plex?”

“I. I don’t know, man.” He licked his lips. “A lot of people. All her team, all the people she—”

He stopped. I nodded, mouth tight. Detached regret for Jad, Kiyoka and the others clamped and tamped down where it wouldn’t get in the way.

“Yes. Her. Next question.”

“Look, man, I can’t help you. You shouldn’t even—”

I shifted towards him, impatiently. Raging at the edges like lit paper. He flinched again, worse than he had when he thought I was Yukio.

“Alright, alright. I’ll tell you. Just leave me alone. What do you want to know?”

Go to work. Soak it up.

“First of all I want to know what you know, or think you know, about Sylvie Oshima.”

He sighed. “Man, I told you not to get involved. Back in that sweeper bar. I warned you.”

“Yeah, me and Yukio both, it seems. Very public-spirited of you, running round warning everybody. Why’d she scare you so much, Plex?”

“You don’t know?”

“Let’s pretend I don’t.” I raised a hand, displacement gesture as the anger threatened to get out. “And let’s also pretend that if you try to lie to me, I’ll torch your fucking head off.”

He swallowed. “She’s, she says she’s Quellcrist Falconer.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “So is she?”

“Fuck, man, how would I know?”

“In your professional opinion, could she be?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded almost plaintive. “What do you want from me? You went with her to New Hok, you know what it’s like up there. I suppose, yeah, I suppose she could be. She might have stumbled on a cache of backed-up personalities. Got contaminated somehow.”

“But you don’t buy it?”

“It doesn’t seem very likely. I can’t see why a personality store would be set up to leak virally in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, even for a bunch of fuckwit Quellists. Where’s the value? And least of all a backup of their precious fucking revolutionary wet-dream icon.”

“So,” I said tonelessly. “Not a big fan of the Quellists, then?”

For the first time I could remember, Plex seemed to shed his shield of apologetic diffidence. A choked snort came out of him—someone with less breeding would have spat, I guess.

“Look around you, Kovacs. You think I’d be living like this if the Unsettlement hadn’t hit the New Hok ‘weed trade the way it did? Who do you think I’ve got to thank for that?”

“That’s a complex historical question—”

“Like fuck it is.”

“—that I’m not really qualified to answer. But I can see why you’d be pissed off. It must be tough having to trawl your playmates out of second rate dancehalls like this one. Not being able to afford the dress code on the First Families party circuit. I feel for you.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

I felt the way my own expression chilled over. Evidently he saw it too, and the sudden rage leaked back out of him almost visibly. I talked to stop myself hitting and hurting him.

“I grew up in a Newpest slum, Plex. My mother and father worked the belaweed mills, everybody did. Temp contracts, day rate, no benefits. There were times we were lucky if we ate twice a day. And this wasn’t any fucking trade slump either, it was business as usual. Motherfuckers like you and your family got rich off it.” I drew a breath and cranked myself back down to a dead irony. “So you’re going to have to forgive my lack of sympathy for your tragically decayed aristo circumstances, because I’m a little short right now. ‘kay?”

He wet his lips and nodded.

“Okay. Okay, man, it’s cool.”

“Yeah.” I nodded back. “Now. No reason for a stored copy of Quell to be set on viral deploy, you said. ”

“Yeah. Right, that’s right.” He was stumbling over himself to get back to safe ground. “And, anyway, look, she’s, Oshima’s loaded to the eyes with all sorts of baffles to stop viral stuff soaking through the coupling. That deCom command shit is state of the art.”

“Yeah, so that brings us back to where we started. If she isn’t really Quell, why are you so scared of her?”

He blinked at me. “Why am I—? Fuck, man, because whether she is Quell or whether she isn’t, she thinks she is. That’s a major psychosis. Would you put a psychotic in charge of that software?”

I shrugged. “From what I saw in New Hok, half of deCom would qualify for the same ticket. They’re not overly balanced as a profession.”

“Yeah, but I doubt many of them think they’re the reincarnation of a revolutionary leader three centuries dead. I doubt they can quote—”

He stopped. I looked at him.

“Quote what?”

“Stuff. You know.” He looked away, twitchily. “Old stuff from the war, the Unsettlement. You must have heard the way she talks sometimes, that period-flic Japanese she comes out with.”

“Yeah, I have. But that’s not what you were going to say, Plex. Is it.”

He tried to get up from the automould. I stepped closer and he froze. I looked down at him with the same expression I’d had when I talked about my family. Didn’t even lift the shard gun.

“Quote what?”

“Man, Tanaseda would—”

“Tanaseda isn’t here. I am. Quote. What?”

He broke. Gestured weakly. “I don’t even know if you’d understand what I’m talking about, man.”

“Try me.”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“No, it’s simple. Let me help you get started. The night I came to collect my sleeve, you and Yukio were talking about her. At a guess, you’d been doing some business with her, at a second guess you’d met her in that sweeper dock dive you took me to for breakfast, right?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“Okay. So the only thing I can’t work out is why you were so surprised to see her there.”

“I didn’t think she’d come back,” he muttered.

I remembered my first view of her that night, the entranced expression on her face as she stared at herself in the mirrorwood bar. Envoy recall dug out a fragment of conversation from the Kompcho apartment, later. Orr, talking up Lazlo’s antics:

… still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?

And Sylvie: What’s that?

You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko. Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.

And Jad: She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament.

I shivered. No, not equipped. Not equipped to remember anything much, wandering around in the Tekitomura night torn between Sylvie Oshima and Nadia Makita, aka Quellcrist fucking Falconer. Not equipped to do anything except maybe navigate by dredged-up fragments of recall and dream, and fetch up in some vaguely remembered bar where, just as you were trying to put yourself back together, some hard-faced gang of bearded scum with a licence to kill from God came to grind your face in the assumed inferiority of your gender.

I remembered Yukio when he burst into the Kompcho apartment the next morning. The fury in his face.

Kovacs, what exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?

And his words to Sylvie when he saw her.

You know who I am.

Not a passing reference to his evident membership of the yakuza. He thought she knew him.

And Sylvie’s even response. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Because at that moment, she didn’t. Envoy recall froze frame for me on the disbelief in Yukio’s face. Not offended vanity after all. He was genuinely shocked.

In the scant seconds of the confrontation, in the seared flesh and blood of the aftermath, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he was so angry.

Anger was a constant. The constant companion of the last two years and longer, rage in myself and the rage reflecting from those around me. I no longer questioned it, it was a state of being. Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.

Or: Because you just wandered into the midst of a complicated deal with a dangerously unstable woman with a head full of state-of-the-art battletech software and a direct line back to—

What?

“What was she selling, Plex?”

The breath came out of him. He seemed to crumple with it.

“I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. She called it the Qualgrist Protocol. Something biological. They took it away from me as soon as I hooked her up with them. Soon as I told them the preliminary data checked out.” He looked away again, this time with no trace of nerves. His voice took on a slurred bitterness. “Said it was too important for me. Couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut. They brought in specialists from Millsport. Fucking Yukio came with them. They cut me out.”

“But you were there. You’d seen her that night.”

“Yeah, she was giving them stuff on blanked deCom chips. Pieces at a time, you know, ‘cause she didn’t trust us.” He coughed out a laugh. ”No more than we trusted her. I was supposed to go along each time and check the prelim scrollup codes. Make sure they were genuine antiques. Everything I okayed, Yukio took and handed on to his pet fucking EmPee team. I never saw any of it. And you know who fucking found her in the first place. I did. She came to me first. And all I get is flushed out with a finder’s fee.”

“How’d she find you?”

A dejected shrug. “Usual channels. She’d been asking around Tekitomura for weeks, apparently. Looking for someone to move this stuff for her.”

“But she didn’t tell you what it was?”

He picked moodily at a smear of bodypaint on the automould. “Nope.”

“Plex, come on. She made a big enough splash with you that you called in your yak pals, but she never showed you what it was she had.”

“She asked for the fucking yak, not me.”

I frowned. “She did?”

“Yeah. Said they’d be interested, said it was something they could use.”

“Oh, that’s crabshit, Plex. Why would the yakuza be interested in a biotech weapon three centuries old. They’re not fighting a war.”

“Maybe she thought they could sell it on to the military for her. For a percentage.”

“But she didn’t say that. You just told me she said it would be something they could use.”

He stared up at me. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not wired for that fucking Envoy total-recall shit like you. I don’t remember what she said, exactly. And I don’t fucking care. Like they said, it’s got nothing to do with me any more.”

I stepped away from him. Leaned back on the container wall and examined the shard gun absently. Peripheral vision told me he wasn’t moving from his slump on the automould. I sighed and it felt like weight shifting off my lungs, only to settle in again.

“Alright, Plex. Just a couple more questions, easy ones, and I’m out of your hair. This new edition of me they’ve got, it was chasing Oshima, right? Not me?”

He clicked his tongue, barely audible above the fusion beat outside.

“Both of you. Tanaseda wants your head on a stick for what you did to Yukio, but you’re not the main attraction.”

I nodded bleakly. For a while I’d thought Sylvie must have somehow given herself away down in Tekitomura yesterday. Talked to the wrong person, been caught on the wrong surveillance cam, done something to bring the pursuit team crashing down on us like angelfire. But it wasn’t that. It was simpler and worse—they’d vectored in on my own unshielded blunder through the Quellcrist Falconer archives. Must have had a global watch on the dataflows since this whole fucking mess blew up.

And you walked right into it. Nice going.

I grimaced. “And is Tanaseda running this?”

Plex hesitated.

“No? So who’s reeling his line in then?”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t back up on me, Plex.”

“Look, I don’t fucking know. I don’t. But it’s up the food chain, I know that. First Families is what I hear, some Millsport court spymistress.”

I felt a qualified sense of relief. Not the yakuza, then. Nice to know my market value hadn’t fallen that far.

“This spymistress got a name?”

“Yeah.” He got up abruptly and went to the hospitality module. Stared down into the smashed interior. “Name of Aiura. Real hardcase by all accounts.”

“You haven’t met her?”

He poked about in the debris I’d left, found an undamaged pipe. “No. I don’t even get to see Tanaseda these days. No way I’d be let inside something at First Families level. But there’s stuff about this Aiura on the court gossip circuit. She’s got a reputation.”

I snorted. “Yeah, don’t they all.”

“I’m serious, Tak.” He fired up the pipe and looked reproachfully at me through the sudden smoke. “I’m trying to help you here. You remember that mess about sixty years ago, when Mitzi Harlan wound up in a Kossuth skullwalk porn flic?”

“Vaguely.” I’d been busy at the time, stealing bioware and offworld databonds in the company of Virginia Vidaura and the Little Blue Bugs.

High-yield criminality masquerading as political commitment. We watched the news for word of the police efforts at pursuit, not much else.

There hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the incessant scandals and misdemeanours of Harlan’s World’s aristo larvae.

“Yeah, well, the word is that this Aiura ran damage limitation and cleanup for the Harlan family. Closed down the studio with extreme prejudice, hunted down everyone involved. I heard most of them got the skyride. She took them up to Rila Crags at night, strapped them to a grav pack each and just flipped the switch.”

“Very elegant.”

Plex drew his lungs full of smoke and gestured. His voice came out squeaky.

“Way she is, apparently. Old school, you know.”

“You got any idea where she got the copy of me from?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’d guess Protectorate military storage. He’s young, a lot younger than you. Are now, I mean.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Yeah, they hauled me in for an interview last month when he first got up here from Millsport. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they talk. He’s still calling himself an Envoy.”

I grimaced again.

“He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—”

“Yeah, alright, he’s young. Got it. Did he say anything about me?”

“Not really, mostly he just asked questions and listened. Only,” Plex drew on the pipe again. “I got the impression he was, I don’t know, disappointed or something. About what you were doing these days.”

I felt my eyes narrow. “He said that?”

“No, no,” Plex waved the pipe, trickled smoke from his nose and mouth.

“Just an impression I got, ‘s all.”

I nodded. “Okay, one last question. You said they took her to Millsport. Where?”

Another pause. I shot him a curious look.

“Come on, what have you got to lose now? Where are they taking her?”

“Tak, let it go. This is just like the sweeper bar, all over again. You’re getting involved in something that doesn’t—”

“I’m already involved, Plex. Tanaseda’s taken care of that.”

“No, listen. Tanaseda will deal. You’ve got Yukio’s stack, man. You could negotiate for its safe return. He’ll do it, I know him. He and Hirayasu senior go back a century or more. He’s Yukio’s sempai, he’s practically his adoptive uncle. He’ll have to cut a deal.”

“And you think this Aiura’s going to let it go at that?”

“Sure, why not.” Plex gestured with the pipe. “She’s got what she wants. As long as you stay out of—”

“Plex, think about it. I’m double-sleeved. That’s a UN rap, big-time penalties for all involved. Not to mention the issue of whether they’re even entitled to hold a stored copy of a serving Envoy in the first place. If the Protectorate ever finds out about this, Aiura the spymistress is going to be looking at some serious storage, First Families connections or not. The sun’ll be a fucking red dwarf by the time they let her out.”

Plex snorted. “You think so? You really think the UN are going to come out here and risk upsetting the local oligarchy for the sake of one double sleeving?”

“If it’s made public enough, yes. They’ll have to. They can’t be seen to do anything else. Believe me, Plex, I know, I used to do this for a living. The whole Protectorate system hangs together on an assumption that no one dare step out of line. As soon as someone does, and gets away with it, no matter how small that initial transgression, it’ll be like the first crack in the dam wall. If what’s been done here becomes common knowledge, the Protectorate will have to demand Aiura’s cortical stack on a plate. And if the First Families don’t comply, the UN will send the Envoys, because a refusal by local oligarchy to comply can only be read one way, as insurrection. And insurrections get put down, wherever they are, at whatever cost, without fail.”

I watched him, watched it sink in as it had sunk into me when I first heard the news in Drava. The understanding of what had been done, the step that had been taken and the sequence of inevitability that we were all now locked into. The fact that there was no way back from this situation that didn’t involve someone called Takeshi Kovacs dying for good.

“This Aiura,” I said quietly, “has backed herself into a corner. I would love to know why, I would love to know what it was that was so fucking important it was worth this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. One of us has to go, me or him, and the easiest way for her to make that happen is to keep sending him after me until either he kills me or I kill him.”

He looked back at me, pupils blasted wide with the mix of whiff and mushrooms, pipe forgotten and trailing faint fumes from the cupped bowl of his hand. Like it was all too much to take in. Like I was a piece of take hallucination that refused to morph into something more pleasant or just go away.

I shook my head. Tried to get Sylvie’s Slipins out of it.

“So, like I said, Plex, I need to know. I really need to know. Oshima, Aiura, and Kovacs. Where do I find these people?”

He shook his head. “It’s no good, Tak. I mean, I’ll tell you. You really want to know, I’ll tell you. But it isn’t going to help. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no way you can—”

“Why don’t you just tell me, Plex. Get it off your chest. Let me worry about the logistics.”

So he told me. And I did the logistics, and worried at it.

All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reef dive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.