Woken Furies

TWENTY

There were storm warnings all the way south.

On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout.

Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.

This one had been building for a while—I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava—and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbours among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.

The skipper of the Haiduci’s Daughter took it philosophically.

“Seen worse,” he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge.

“Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.”

I grunted noncommittally. He squinted away from the display at me.

“You were away then, right?”

“Yeah, offworld.”

He laughed raspingly. “Yeah, that’s right. All that exotic travel you been doing. So when do I get to see your pretty face on KossuthNet, then? Got a one-to-one lined up with Maggie Sugita when we get in?”

“Give me time, man.”

“More time? Haven’t you had enough time yet?”

It was the line of banter we’d maintained all the way down from Tekitomura. Like quite a few freight skippers I’d met, Ari Japaridze was a shrewd but relatively unimaginative man. He knew next to nothing about me, which, he told me, was the way he liked things to stay with his passengers, but he was nobody’s fool. And it didn’t take an archaeologue to work out that if a man comes aboard your raddled old freighter an hour before it leaves and offers as much for a cramped crewroom berth as you’d pay for a Saffron Line cabin—well, that man probably isn’t on friendly terms with law enforcement. For Japaridze, the holes he’d turned up in my knowledge of the last couple of decades on Harlan’s World had a very simple explanation. I’d been away, in the time-honoured criminal sense of the word. I countered this assumption with the simple truth about my absence and got the rasping laugh every time.

Which suited me fine. People will believe what they want to believe look at the fucking Beards—and I got the distinct impression that there was some storage time in Japaridze’s past. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but I got an invite up to the bridge on our second evening out of Tekitomura and by the time we left Erkezes on the southernmost tip of the Saffron Archipelago, we were swapping notes on preferred Newpest drinking-holes and how best to barbecue bottleback steaks.

I tried not to let the time chafe at me.

Tried not to think about the Millsport Archipelago and the long westward arc we were cutting away from it.

Sleep was hard.

The night-time bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter provided a viable alternative. I sat with Japaridze and drank cheap Millsport blended whisky, watching as the freighter ploughed her way south into warmer seas and air that was fragrant with the scent of belaweed. I talked, as automatic as the machines that kept the vessel on her curving course, stock tales of sex and travel, memories of Newpest and the Kossuth hinterlands. I massaged the muscles of my left arm where they still ached and throbbed. I flexed my left hand against the pain it gave me. Beneath it all, I thought about ways to kill Aiura and myself.

By day, I prowled the decks and mingled with the other passengers as little as possible. They were an unappealing bunch anyway, three burnt out and bitter-talking deComs heading south, maybe for home, maybe just for the sun; a hard-eyed webjelly entrepreneur and his bodyguard, accompanying an oil shipment to Newpest; a young New Revelation priest and his carefully wrapped wife who joined ship at Erkezes. Another half dozen less memorable men and women who kept to themselves even more than I did and looked away whenever they were spoken to.

A certain degree of social interaction was unavoidable. Haiduci’s Daughter was a small vessel, in essence not much more than a tug welded onto the nose of four duplex freight pods and a powerful hoverload driver.

Access gantries ran at two levels from the forward decks between and alongside the pods and back to a narrow observation bubble bolted on to the rear. What living space there was felt crowded. There were a few squabbles early on, including one over stolen food that Japaridze had to break up with threats of putting people off at Erkezes, but by the time we left the Saffron Archipelago behind, everybody had pretty much settled down. I had a couple of forced conversations with the deComs over meals, trying to show interest in their hard-luck stories and life-in-the-Uncleared bravado. From the webjelly oil merchant I got repetitive lectures on the economic benefits that would emerge from the Mecsek regime’s austerity programme. The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterwards.

We made good time from Erkezes to the Gulf and there was no sign of a storm when we got there. I found myself crowded out of my usual brooding spots as the other passengers came out to enjoy the novelty of warm weather and sun strong enough to tan. You couldn’t blame them—the sky was a solid blue from horizon to horizon, Daikoku and Hotei both showing clear and high up. A strong breeze out of the north east kept the heat pleasant and lifted spray from the ruffled surface of the sea. Westward, waves broke white and just audible on the great curving reefs that heralded the eventual rise of the Kossuth gulf coastline further south.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said a quiet voice beside me at the rail.

I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realised, several months pregnant.

I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.

Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.

“I’ve never travelled this far south before,” she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. “Have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it always this hot?”

I looked at her again, bleakly. “It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.”

“Ah.” She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. “You do not approve?”

I shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.”

“Mecsek.” She made a small spitting sound. “He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.”

“Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.”

She flinched.

“You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—”

“Four.” I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. “I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.”

I saw colour rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.

“The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,” she murmured. “Many of us—”

“Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your genocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.”

Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.

“You misjudge me.” She touched the scarf she wore. “I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.”

“Then you’re more stupid than you look.”

An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.

“So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—”

“Look,” I said coldly. “Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.”

“See,” she said, voice turned slightly shrill. “You lust after her like all the others. You give in to her cheap sensual tricks and—”

“Oh, please. For my money, Mitzi Harlan’s a stupid, superficial little trollop, but you know what? At least she lives her life as if it belongs to her. Instead of abasing herself at the feet of any fucking baboon who can grow a beard and some external genitalia.”

“Are you calling my husband a—”

“No.” I swung on her. It seemed I didn’t have it cranked down after all.

My hands shot out and grasped her by the shoulders. “No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you! You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.”

Then there was a hand on my arm.

“Hey, man.” It was one of the deComs, backed up by the entrepreneur’s bodyguard. He looked scared but determined. “That’s enough. Leave her alone.”

I looked at his fingers, where they hung on my elbow. I wondered briefly about breaking them, locking out the arm behind them and—

A memory flared to life inside me. My father shaking my mother by the shoulders like a belaweed rack that wouldn’t come loose of its mooring, screaming abuse and whisky fumes into her face. Seven years old, I’d gone for his arm and tried to tug it away.

He’d clouted me almost absently that time, across the room and into a corner. Gone back to her.

I unlocked my hands from the woman’s shoulders. Shook off the deCom’s grip. Mentally shook myself by the throat.

“Now back off, man.”

“Sure,” I said it quietly. “Like I said, sister, ‘s a free world. Got nothing to do with me.”

The storm clipped us round the ear a couple of hours later. A long trailing scarf of bad weather that darkened the sky outside my porthole and caught the Haiduci’s Daughter broadside on. I was flat on my back in my bunk at the time, staring at the metal grey ceiling and giving myself a furious lecture on undesirable involvement. I heard the engine thrum kick up a notch and guessed Japaridze was pulling more buoyancy from the grav system. A couple of minutes later the narrow cabin space seemed to lurch sideways and on the table opposite a glass slid a couple of centimetres before the antispill surface gripped it in place. The water it held slopped alarmingly and splashed over the edge. I sighed and got off the bunk, bracing myself across the cabin and leaning down to peer out of the porthole. Sudden rain slapped the glass.

Somewhere in the freighter, an alarm went off.

I frowned. It seemed an extreme response to what wasn’t much more than some choppy water. I shouldered my way into a light jacket I’d bought from one of the freighter’s crew members, stowed Tebbit knife and Rapsodia beneath it and slipped out into the corridor.

Getting involved again, are we?

Hardly. If this tub is going to sink, I want advance warning.

I followed the alarms up to main deck level and out into the rain. A member of the crew passed me, hefting a clumsy long-barrelled blaster.

“ ‘s going on?” I asked her.

“Search me, sam.” She spared me a grim look, jerked her head aft. “Main board’s showing a breach in cargo. Maybe a ripwing trying to get in out of the storm. Maybe not.”

“You want a hand?”

She hesitated, suspicion swimming momentarily on her face, then made a decision. Maybe Japaridze had said something to her about me, maybe she just liked my recently acquired face. Or maybe she was just scared, and could use the company.

“Sure. Thanks.”

We worked our way back towards the cargo pods, and along one of the gantries, bracing ourselves each time the freighter rolled. Rain whipped in at odd, wind-driven angles. The alarm shrilled querulously over the weather. Ahead, in the sudden, sullen gloom of the squall, a row of red lights pulsed on and off along one section of the left-hand freight pod. Below the flashing alert signals, pale light showed from the edge of a cracked hatch. The crew-woman hissed and gestured with the blaster barrel.

“That’s it.” She started forward. “Someone’s in there.”

I shot her a glance. “Or something. Ripwings, right?”

“Yeah, but it takes a pretty sharp ripwing to figure out the buttons. Usually they’ll just short the system with a beakbutt and hope it lets them in. And I don’t smell anything burning.”

“Me neither.” I calibrated the gantry space, the rise of the cargo pods over us. Drew the Rapsodia and dialled it to maximum dispersal. “Okay, so let’s do this sensibly. Let me go in there first.”

“I’m supposed—”

“Yeah, I’m sure you are. But I used to do this for a living. So how about you have this one on me. Stay here, shoot anything that comes out of that hatch unless you hear me call it first.”

I moved to the hatch as carefully as I could on the unstable footing and examined the locking mechanism. There didn’t appear to be any damage.

The hatch hung outward a couple of centimetres, maybe tipped that way by the pitch of the freighter in the squall.

After whichever pirate ninja opened it had cracked the lock, that is.

Thanks for that.

I tuned out the squall and the alarm. Listened for motion on the other side, cranked the neurachem tight enough to pick up heavy breathing.

Nothing. No one there.

Or someone with stealth combat training.

Will you shut up.

I fitted one foot against the edge of the hatch and gave it a cautious shove. The hinges were balanced to a hair—the whole thing swung weightily outward. Without giving myself time to think, I twisted into the gap, Rapsodia tracking for a target.

Nothing.

Waist-high steel barrels stood in shiny ranks across the cargo space. The gaps between were too thin to hide a child, let alone a ninja. I crossed to the nearest and read the label. Finest Saffron Seas Luminescent Xenomedusal Extract, cold press filtered. Webjelly oil, designer branded for added value.

Courtesy of our entrepreneurial expert on austerity.

I laughed and felt the tension puddle back out of me.

Nothing but—

I sniffed.

There was a scent, fleeting on the metallic air in the cargo pod.

And gone.

The New Hok sleeve’s senses were just acute enough to know it was there, but with the knowledge and the conscious effort, it vanished. Out of nowhere, I had a sudden flash recollection of childhood, an uncharacteristically happy image of warmth and laughter that I couldn’t place. Whatever the smell was, it was something I knew intimately.

I stowed the Rapsodia and moved back to the hatch.

“There’s nothing in here. I’m coming out.”

I stepped back into the warm splatter of the rain and heaved the hatch closed again. It locked into place with a solid thunk of security bolts, shutting in whatever trace scent of the past I’d picked up on. The pulsing reddish radiance over my head died out and the alarm, which had settled to an unnoticed background constant, was abruptly silent.

“What were you doing in there?”

It was the entrepreneur, face tense closing on angry. He had his security in tow. A handful of crew members crowded behind. I sighed.

“Checking on your investment. All sealed and safe, don’t worry. Looks like the pod locks glitched.” I looked at the crew-woman with the blaster.

“Or maybe that extra smart ripwing showed up after all and we scared it off. Look, this is a bit of a long shot I know, but is there a sniffer set anywhere aboard?”

“Sniffer set? Like, for the police you mean?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. You could ask the skipper.”

I nodded. “Yeah well, like I said—”

“I asked you a question.”

The tension in the entrepreneur’s features had made it all the way to anger. At his side, his security glared supportively.

“Yeah, and I answered it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“You’re not going anywhere. Tomas.”

I cut the bodyguard a glance before he could act on the command.

He froze and shifted his feet. I shifted my eyes to the entrepreneur, fighting a strong urge to push the confrontation as far as it would go.

Since my run-in with the priest’s wife, I’d been twitchy with the need to do violence.

“If your tuskhead here touches me, he’s going to need surgery. And if you don’t get out of my way, so will you. I already told you, your cargo’s safe. Now suppose you step aside and save us both an embarrassing scene.”

He looked back at Tomas, and evidently read something instructive in his expression. He moved.

“Thank you.” I pushed my way through the gathered crew members behind her. “Anybody seen Japaridze?”

“On the bridge, probably,” said someone. “But Itsuko’s right, there’s no sniffer gear on the ‘duct. We’re not fucking seacops.”

Laughter. Someone sang the signature tune to the experia show of the same name, and the rest took it up for a couple of bars. I smiled thinly and shouldered my way past. As I left, I heard the entrepreneur demanding loudly that the hatch be opened again immediately.

Oh well.

I went to find Japaridze anyway. If nothing else, at least he could provide me with a drink.

The squall passed.

I sat on the bridge and watched it fade away eastward on the weather scanners, wishing the knot inside me would do the same. Outside, the sky brightened and the waves stopped knocking the Haiduci’s Daughter about.

Japaridze slacked off the emergency drive to the grav motors and the freighter settled back into her former stability.

“So tell me the truth, sam.” He poured me another shot of Millsport blended and settled back in the chair across the navigation table. There was no one else on the bridge. “You’re casing the webjelly consignment, right?”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Well, if I am, that’s a pretty unhealthy question to ask me.”

“Nah, not really.” He winked and knocked his drink back in one. Since it had become clear that the weather was going to leave us alone, he’d let himself get slightly drunk. “That rucking prick, for me you can have his cargo. Just so long as you don’t try and lift it while it’s on the ‘dud.”

“Right.” I raised my glass to him.

“So who is it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Who you running radar for? The yak? Weed Expanse gangs? Thing is—”

“Ari, I’m serious.”

He blinked at me. “What?”

“Think about it. If I’m a yak research squad, you go asking questions like that, it’s going to get you Really Dead.”

“Ah, crabshit. You ain’t going to kill me.” He got up, leaned across the table towards me and peered into my face. “You don’t got the eyes for it. I can tell.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, besides.” He sank back into his seat and gestured untidily with his glass. “Who’s going to sail this tub into Newpest harbour if I’m dead. She’s not like those Saffron Line AI babies, you know. Every now and then, she needs the human touch.”

I shrugged. “I guess I could scare someone on the crew into it. Show them your smouldering corpse for an incentive.”

“That’s good thinking.” He grinned and reached for the bottle again. “I hadn’t thought of that. But like I said, I don’t see it in your eyes.”

“Met a lot like me, have you?”

He filled our glasses. “Man, I was one like you. I grew up in Newpest just like you and I was a pirate, just like you. Used to work route robberies with the Seven Per Cent Angels. Crabshit stuff, skimmer cargo coming in over the Expanse.” He paused and looked me in the eyes. “I got caught.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it was too bad. They took the flesh off me and they dumped me in the store for three decades, near enough. When I got out, all they had to sleeve me in was some wired-for-shit methhead’s body. My family had all grown up, or moved away, or, you know, died or something. I had a daughter, seven years old when I went in, she was ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing by the time I got out. She had a life and a family of her own. Even if I had known how to relate to her, she didn’t want to know me. I was just a thirty-year gap in her eyes. Likewise her mother, who’d found some other guy, had kids, well, you know how it goes.” He sank his drink, shivered and stared at me through suddenly teared eyes. He poured himself another. “My brother died in a bug crash a couple of years after I went away, no insurance, no way to get a re-sleeve. My sister was in the store, she’d gone in ten years after me, wasn’t getting out for another twenty. There’d been another brother, born a couple of years after I went away, I didn’t know what to say to him. My father and mother were separated—he died first, got his re-sleeve policy through and went off somewhere to be young, free and single again. Wouldn’t wait for her. I went to see her but all she did was stare out of the window with this smile on her face, kept saying soon, soon, it’ll be my turn soon. Gave me the fucking creeps.”

“So you went back to the Angels.”

“Good guess.”

I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.

“Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.”

“Yeah?” I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. “How long this time?”

He grinned, like a man in front of a fire. “Eighty-five.”

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whisky and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.

“This time, I lost them all for good. Whatever second life my mother got, I missed that. And she’d opted out of a third time around, just had herself stored with instructions for rental re-sleeve on a list of family occasions. Release of her son Ari from penal storage wasn’t on that list, so I took the hint. Brother was still dead, sister got out of the store while I was in, went north decades before I got out again, I don’t know where. Maybe looking for her father.”

“And your daughter’s family?”

He laughed and shrugged. “Daughter, grandkids. Man, by then I was another two generations out of step with them, I didn’t even try to catch up. I just took what I had and I ran with it.”

“Which was what?” I nodded at him. “This sleeve?”

“Yeah, this sleeve. I got what you might call lucky. Belonged to some rayhunter captain got busted for hooking out of a First Families marine estate. Good solid sleeve, well looked after. Some useful seagoing software racked in, and some weird instinctive shit for weather. Sort of painted a career for me all on its own. I got a loan on a boat, made some money. Got a bigger boat, made some more. Got the ‘duct. Got a woman back in Newpest now. Couple of kids I’m watching grow up.”

I raised my glass without irony. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, like I said. I got lucky.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

He leaned forward on the table and looked at me. “You know why I’m telling you this.”

I quelled a grin. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know. He was doing his best.

“Alright, Ari. Tell you what, I’ll lay off your cargo. I’ll mend my ways, give up piracy and start a family. Thanks for the tip.”

He shook his head. “Not telling you anything you don’t already know, sam. Just reminding you, is all. This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.”

He was right, of course.

As a messenger, he was also a little late.

Evening caught up with the Haiduci’s Daughter on her westward curve a couple of hours later. The sun split like a cracked egg either side of a rising

Hotei and reddish light soaked out across the horizon in both directions.

The low rise of Kossuth’s gulf coastline painted a thick black base for the picture. High above, thin cloud cover glowed like a shovel full of heated coins.

I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset—I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.

I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines—if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.

Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between.

Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground—might as well see some of it, I reasoned at the time.

And then Innenin.

When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime.

Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the Innenin debacle, I ended up back on Harlan’s World running rings around local law enforcement and the petty criminals they played tag with. We carved out reputations, stayed ahead of the game, went through anyone who opposed us like angelfire.

An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.

It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right—all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some unnoticed moment during my time in the Corps.

But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.

I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.

On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked south east where the dark was gathering, approximately towards Newpest.

I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.

Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half dozen metres away. I edged round to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good metre from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.

“Fuck are you looking at?”

For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.

“I’m not going to see them,” I told it after a while. “So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.”

But still, in the fast growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.

Like not being alone.

The ripwing and I sat hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.

TWENTY-ONE

We pulled into Newpest harbour a little after noon the next day and crept to a mooring with painstaking care. The whole port was jammed up with hoverloaders and other vessels fleeing the threat of heavy weather in the eastern gulf, and the harbourmaster software had arranged them according to some counterintuitive mathematical scheme that the Haiduci’s Daughter didn’t have an interface for. Japaridze took the con on manual, cursing machines in general and the Port Authority AI in particular as we wound our way through the apparently random thickets of shipping.

“Fucking upgrade this, upgrade that. If I’d wanted to be a fucking techhead, I would have got a job with deCom.”

Like me, he had a slight but insistent hangover.

We said our farewells on the bridge and I went down to the foredeck. I tossed my pack ashore while the autograpples were still cranking us in, and leapt the closing gap to the wharf from the rail. It got me a couple of glances from bystanders but no uniformed attention. With a circling storm out on the horizon and a harbour packed to capacity, port security had other things to worry about than reckless disembarkation. I picked up the pack, slung it on one shoulder and drifted into the sparse flow of pedestrians along the wharf. The heat settled on me wetly. In a couple of minutes I was off the waterfront, streaming sweat and flagging down an autocab.

“Inland harbour,” I told it. “Charter terminal, and hurry.”

The cab made a U-turn and plunged back into the main crosstown thoroughfares. Newpest unfolded around me.

It’s changed a lot in the couple of centuries I’ve been coming back to it. The town I grew up in was low-lying, like the land it was built on, sprawling in stormproofed snub profile units and superbubbles across the isthmus between the sea and the great clogged lake that would later become the Weed Expanse. Back then Newpest carried the fragrance of belaweed and the stink of the various industrial processes it was subject to like the mix of perfume and body odour on a cheap whore. You couldn’t get away from either without leaving town.

So much for youthful reminiscence.

As the Unsettlement receded into history, a return to relative prosperity brought new growth, out along the inner shore of the Expanse and the long curve of the coastline, and upward into the tropical sky. The height of the buildings in central Newpest soared, rising on the back of increased confidence in storm management technology and a burgeoning, moneyed middle class who needed to live near their investments but didn’t want to have to smell them. By the time I joined the Envoys, environmental legislation had started to take the edge off the air at ground level and there were skyscrapers downtown to rival anything you could find in Millsport.

After that, my visits were infrequent and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice when exactly the trend started to reverse and why. All I knew was that now there were quarters of the southern city where the stink was back, and the brave new developments along the coast and the Expanse were collapsing, kilometre by kilometre, into creeping shantytown decay.

In the centre there were beggars on the streets and armed security outside most of the large buildings. Looking out of the side window of the auto cab, I caught an echo of irritated tension in the way people moved that hadn’t been there forty years ago.

We crossed the centre in a raised priority lane that sent the digits on the cab meter spinning into a blur. It didn’t last long—aside from one or two glossy limos and a scattering of cabs, we had the vaulted road to ourselves and when we picked up the main Expanse highway on the other side, the charge count settled down to a reasonable rate. We curled away from the high-rise zone and out across the shanties. Low-level housing, pressed up close to the carriageway. This story I already knew from Segesvar. The cleared embankment space on either side of the road had been sold off while I was away and previous health and safety restrictions waived. I caught a glimpse of a naked two-year-old child gripping the wire fence around a flat roof, mesmerised by the blastpast of the traffic two metres from her face. On another roof further along, two kids not much older hurled makeshift missiles that missed and fell bouncing in our wake.

The inland harbour exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighbourhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the programme ran that way—maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway—steel-boned and up jutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.

We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly-coloured holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.

“You for hire?”

He turned lacklustre eyes on me without lifting his head.

“Mama.”

I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalise. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.

“Where you want to go?”

“Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.”

He smirked. “Yeah, Vchira Beach—it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?”

“Southern reach. The Strip.”

“Sourcetown.” His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. “You a surfer?”

“Do I look like a surfer?”

Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blonde woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared Give me Mitzi Harlan’s job—I could do it lying down. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.

“Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?”

“Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?”

She shrugged. “I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.”

“An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?”

She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. “Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?”

“Just what you see.”

“Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.”

The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the two-fifty mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.

“Sure. Seems very reasonable You want to show me my ride?”

Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package—a blunt-nosed twenty-metre twin turbine rig that deserved the name hover loader more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sealanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armoured skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.

“That get much use?” I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.

She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. “There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or,”—an involuntary glance back towards the terminal building—“wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?”

“No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.” I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one.

Dialled a local number.

“Southside holdings,” said an androgynous synth voice. “Due to—”

I reeled off the fourteen-digit discreet coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.

“Kovacs, where the fuck have you been?”

I grinned despite myself. “Hey Rad. Nice to talk to you too.”

“It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?”

“It’s been two months, Radul.”

“It’s been more than two.”

“It’s been nine weeks—that’s my final offer.”

He laughed down the line, a sound that reminded me of a trawl winch cranking at speed. “Okay, Tak. So how was your trip? Catch any fish?”

“Yes, I did.” I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the cortical stacks. “Got some for you right here as promised. Canned for ease of carriage.”

“Of course. Hardly expect you to bring it fresh. Imagine the stink. Especially after three months.”

“Two months.”

The trawler winch again. “Nine weeks, I thought we agreed. So are you in town, finally?”

“Near enough, yeah.”

“You coming out to visit?”

“Yeah, see, that’s the problem. Something’s come up and I can’t. But I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fish—”

“No, nor would I. Your last consignment hasn’t kept well. Barely fit for consumption these days. My boys think I’m crazy still serving it up, but I told them. Takeshi Kovacs is old school. He pays his debts. We do what he asks, and when he surfaces finally, he will do what is right.”

I hesitated. Calibrated.

“I can’t get you your money right now, Rad. I daren’t go near a major credit transaction. Wouldn’t be good for you any more than for me. I’ll need time to sort it out. But you can have the fish, if you send someone to collect in the next hour.”

The silence crawled back onto the line. This was pushing the elastic of the debt to failure point, and we both knew it.

“Look, I got four. That’s one more than expected. You can have them now, all of them. You can serve them up without me, use them how you like, or not at all if my credit’s really out.”

He said nothing. His presence on the line was oppressive, like the wet heat coming off the Weed Expanse. Envoy sense told me this was the break, and Envoy sense is rarely wrong.

“The money’s coming, Rad. Hit me with a surcharge, if that’s what it takes. As soon as I’m done with this other shit, we’re back to business as usual. This is strictly temporary.”

Still nothing. The silence was beginning to sing, the tiny lethal song of a cable snagged and under stress. I stared out across the Expanse, as if I could find him and make eye contact.

“He would have got you,” I said bluntly. “You know that.”

The silence lasted a moment longer, then snapped across. Segesvar’s voice rang with false boisterousness.

“What you talking about, Tak?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Our meth-dealing friend, back in the day. You ran with the others, Rad, but the way your leg was, you wouldn’t have had a chance. If he’d come through me, he would have caught you up. You know that. The others ran, I stayed.”

On the other end of the line I heard him breathe out, like something uncoiling.

“So,” he said. “A surcharge. Shall we say thirty per cent?”

“Sounds reasonable,” I lied, for both of us.

“Yes. But I think your previous fish will have to be taken off the menu now. Why don’t you come here to give your traditional valediction, and we’ll discuss the terms of this. Refinancing.”

“Can’t do that, Rad. I told you, I’m only passing through. An hour from now I’m gone again. Be a week or more before I can get back.”

“Then,” I could almost see him shrug. “You will miss the valediction. I would not have thought you would want that.”

“I don’t.” This was punishment, another surcharge on top of my volunteered thirty per cent. Segesvar had me worked out, it’s a core skill in organised crime and he was good at his trade. The Kossuth haiduci might not have the cachet and sophistication of the yakuza further north, but it’s essentially the same game. If you’re going to make a living out of extortion, you’d better know how to get to people. And how to get to Takeshi Kovacs was painted all over my recent past like blood. It couldn’t have taken a lot of working out.

“Then come,” he said warmly. “We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake. Old time’s sake, heheh? And a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.”

Out of nowhere, Lazlo’s face.

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her.

I glanced across to where Suzi Petkovski was lowering the canopy back over the turbine.

“Sorry, Rad. This is too important to juggle. You want your fish, send someone out to the inland harbour. Charter terminal, ramp seven. I’ll be here for an hour.”

“No valediction?”

I grimaced. “No valediction. I don’t have the time.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I think,” he said finally, “that I would like very much to look in your eyes right now, Takeshi Kovacs. Perhaps I will come myself.”

“Sure. Be good to see you. Just make it inside the hour.”

He hung up. I gritted my teeth and smashed a fist against the crate beside me.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

You look after her, right. You keep her safe.

Yeah, yeah. Alright.

I’m trusting you, Micky.

Alright, I fucking hear you.

The chime of a phone.

For a moment, I held the one I was using stupidly to my ear. Then it hit me that the sound came from the opened pack beside me. I leaned over and pushed aside three or four phones before I found the one with the lit display. It was one I’d used before, one with a broken seal.

“Yeah?”

Nothing. The line was open but there was no sound on it. Not even static. Perfect black silence yawned into my ear.

“Hello?”

And something whispered up out of the dark, just barely more audible than the tension I’d felt in the previous call.

hurry

And then there was only the silence again.

I lowered the phone and stared at it.

I’d made three calls in Tekitomura, used three phones from the pack. I’d called Lazlo, I’d called Yaroslav, I’d called Isa. It could have been any of the three that had just rung. To know for sure, I’d need to check the log to see who the phone had connected with before.

But I didn’t need to.

A whisper out of dark silence. A voice over distance you couldn’t measure. hurry

I knew which phone it was.

And I knew who was calling me.

TWENTY-TWO

Segesvar was as good as his word. Forty minutes after he hung up, a garish red and black open-top sports skimmer came howling off the Expanse and into the harbour at illegal speed. Every head on the wharf turned to watch it arrive. It was the kind of boatcraft that on the seaward side of Newpest would have occasioned an instant Port Authority override ‘cast and an ignominious stall in the water there and then. I don’t know whether the inland harbour was ill-equipped, if Segesvar had expensive counterjamming software installed in his rich-kid toy, or if the Weed Expanse gangs just had the Inland PA in their pocket. In any event, the Expansemobile didn’t stall out. Instead it banked about, raising spray, and made a fast line for the gap between ramps six and seven. A dozen metres out, it cut its motors and swept in on momentum. Behind the wheel, Segesvar spotted me. I nodded and raised one hand. He waved back.

I sighed.

This stuff trails out behind us across the decades, but it isn’t like the spray Radul Segesvar’s arrival was cutting from the water in the harbour. It doesn’t fall tracelessly back. It just hangs there instead, like the raised dust you get in the wake of a Sharyan desert cruiser, and if you turn about and head back into your own past, you find yourself coughing on it.

“Hey, Kovacs.”

It was a shout, maliciously loud and cheerful. Segesvar was standing up in the cockpit, still steering. Broad, gullwing-framed sunshades covered his eyes in conscious rejection of the Millsport fashion for ultra-engineered finger-width lenses. A paper-thin, hand-sanded iridescent swamp panther skin jacket draped his frame. He waved again and grinned. From the bow of the vessel a grapple line fired with a metallic bang. It was harpoon headed, unrelated to any of the sockets along the ramp edge and it chewed a hole in the evercrete facing of the wharf, half a metre below the point where I stood. The skimmer cranked itself in and Segesvar leapt out of the cockpit to stand on the bow, looking up at me.

“You want to bellow my name a couple more times,” I asked him evenly. “In case someone didn’t get it first time round.”

“Oops.” He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. “Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?”

“Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?”

“I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?”

I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The haiduci straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own—pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry.

It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties.

Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d re-sleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most haiduci and like me—he’d had his share of time in storage.

“Nice sleeve,” he said, pacing a circle around me. “Very nice. What happened to the other one?”

“Long story.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me.” He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. “Right?”

“Right.”

He sighed theatrically. “This is disappointing, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as close-mouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.”

I shrugged. “I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.”

“Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.”

He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one that got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.

“There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?”

“If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.”

“Some other time.”

“Yeah, you’re always so fucking driven, aren’t you? If it’s not the Envoys or the neoQuells, it’s some fucking private revenge scheme. You know, Tak, it isn’t really my business, but someone needs to tell you this and looks like I get the job. You need to stop and smell the weed, man. Remember that you’re living.” He put his sunlenses back on and jerked his head towards the terminal. “Alright, come on then. Machine coffee, why not. It’ll be a novelty.”

Back in the cool, we sat at a table near glass panels that gave a view out onto the harbour. Half a dozen other spectators sat in the same area with their associated baggage, waiting. A wasted-looking man in rags was doing the rounds among them, holding out a tray for credit chips and a hard luck story for anyone who was interested. Most weren’t. There was a faint odour of cheap antibacterial in the air that I hadn’t noticed before. The cleaning robots must have been by.

The coffee was grim.

“See,” said Segesvar, setting his aside with an exaggerated scowl. “I should have your legs broken just for making me drink that.”

“You could try.”

For a moment, our eyes locked. He shrugged.

“It was a joke, Tak. You’re losing your sense of humour.”

“Yeah, I’m putting a thirty per cent surcharge on it.” I sipped at my own coffee, expressionless. “Used to be my friends could get it for nothing, but times change.”

He let that lie for a moment, then cocked his head and looked me in the eye again.

“You think I’m treating you unfairly?”

“I think you’re conveniently forgetful of the real meaning behind the words you saved my ass back there, man.”

Segesvar nodded as if he’d expected no less. He looked down at the table between us.

“That is an old debt,” he said quietly. “And a questionable one.”

“You didn’t think so at the time.”

It was too far back to summon easily to mind. Back before the Envoy conditioning went in, back where things get blurred with the passing decades. Most of all, I remembered the stink in the alley. Alkaline precipitates from the belaweed processing plant and dumped oil from the hydraulic systems on the compression tanks. The meth dealer’s curses and the glint of the long bottleback gaff as he slashed it through the damp air towards me. The others were gone, their youthful thug enthusiasm for the robbery evaporating in swift terror as that honed steel hook came out and ripped open Radul Segesvar’s leg from kneecap to thigh. Gone yelling and sprinting away into the night like exorcised sprites, leaving Radul dragging himself one yelping metre at a time along the alley after them, leaving me, sixteen years old, facing the steel with empty hands.

Come ‘ere, you little fuck. The dealer was grinning at me in the gloom, almost crooning as he advanced, blocking my escape. Try to tumble me on my own patch, will you. I’m going open you up and feed you your own fucking guts, my lad.

And for the first time in my life, I realised with a sensation like cold hands on my young neck, that I was looking at a man who was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him.

Not batter me like my father, not cut me up like one of the inept gang thugs we squabbled with daily on the streets of Newpest. Kill me. Kill me, and then probably rip out my stack and toss it into the scummed-up waters of the harbour where it would stay for longer than the life of anyone I knew or cared about. It was that image, that terror of being sunk and lost in poisoned water, that drove me forward, made me count the swing of the sharpened steel and hit him as he came off balance on the end of the downstroke.

Then we both went over in the muck and debris and ammoniac stink of the processing plant’s leavings, and I fought him there for the gaff.

Took it from him.

Lashed out and, more by luck than judgment, ripped open his belly with it.

The fight went out of him like water down a sink. He made a loud gurgling, eyes wide and glued to mine. I stared back, rage and fear still punching through the veins in my temples, every chemical switch in my body thrown. I was barely aware of what I’d just done. Then he sank backwards away from me and into the pile of muck. He sat down there as if it was an armchair he liked. I struggled off my knees, dripping alkaline slime from face and hair, still caught in his gaze, still gripping the handle of the gaff. His mouth made flapping motions, his throat gave up wet, desperate sounds. I looked down and I saw his innards still looped over the hook in my hand.

Shock caught me up. My hand spasmed open involuntarily and the hook fell out of it. I staggered away, spraying vomit. The weak, pleading sounds he made damped out beneath the hoarse rasp in my throat as my stomach emptied itself. The hot, urgent reek of fresh sick joined the general stench in the alley. I convulsed with the force of my heaving, and fell over in the mess.

I think he was still alive when I got back to my feet and went to help Segesvar. The sounds he was making followed me all the way out of the alley, and news reports the next day said he’d finally bled to death some time close to dawn. Then again, the same sounds followed me around for weeks afterwards, whenever I went anyway quiet enough to hear myself think. For the best part of the next year, I woke up with them clotted in my ears as often as not.

I looked away from it. The glass panels of the terminal slid back into focus. Across the table, Segesvar was watching me intently. Maybe he was remembering too. He grimaced.

“So you don’t think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappear for nine weeks without a word, leave me holding your shit and looking like a fool in front of the other haiduci. Now you want to reschedule the finance? You know what I’d do to anyone else who pulled this shit?”

I nodded. Recalled with wry humour my own fury at Plex a couple of months back as I stood seeping synthetic body fluids in Tekitomura.

“We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak.”

I’d wanted to kill him, just for saying it like that.

“You think thirty per cent is unjust?”

I sighed.

“Rad, you’re a gangster and I’m.” I gestured. “No better. I don’t think either of us knows much about what’s just and unjust. You do what you like. I’ll find you the money.”

“Alright.” He was still staring at me. “Twenty per cent. That fit your sense of commercial propriety?”

I shook my head, said nothing. I dug in my pocket for the cortical stacks, kept my fist closed as I leaned across with them. “Here. This is what you came for. Four fish. Do what you want with them.”

He pushed my arm aside and jabbed an angry finger in my face.

“No, my friend. I do what you want with them. This is a service I’m providing you, and don’t you fucking forget that. Now, I said twenty per cent. Is that fair?”

The decision crystallised out of nowhere, so fast it was like a slap across the back of the head. Picking it apart later, I couldn’t decide what triggered it, only that it felt like listening again to that tiny voice out of the darkness, telling me to hurry. It felt like a sudden prickle of sweat across my palms and the terror that I was going to be too late for something that mattered.

“I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your haiduci pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from haiduci experia flics like Friends of Ireni Cozma and Outlaw Voices. It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the druglike grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.

“Alright, fuck it. Fifteen per cent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen per cent, right?”

I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. “Alright, fifteen per cent. Do you still want these?”

He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight-of-hand and pocketed them.

“You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,” he growled. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

“That’s a compliment, right?”

He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.

“DeCom vet,” he mumbled. “Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—”

“No, I haven’t got any money,” said Segesvar impatiently. “Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.”

He caught my glance.

“What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?”

Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied grey turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.

To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.

An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more to it than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.

“Weed trade’s been bad, huh?” I shouted over the turbines.

Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.

“Say what?”

“The weed trade,” I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. “Been bad recently, right?”

She shrugged.

“Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.”

It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics was some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.

I went back to watching the skyline.

After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment, then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing and pressed it to my ear.

“Yeah, what?”

The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear there isn’t much time left

“Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.” can’t hold them back much longer …

“Yeah, I’m working on it.” working now … It sounded like a question.

“Yeah, I said—” there are wings out there … a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked …

It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again cracked open from edge to edge … it’s beautiful, Micky …

And gone.

I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.

Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.

“Bad news?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?”

She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one handed.

“Not safely, no.”

I nodded and thought back through the communiqué I’d just had.

“And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?”

“About double?”

“Fine. Do it.”

A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximised. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist. Get below and keep your hands off … something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.

She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.

“You too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.”

“I can hang on.”

“Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.”

I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin.

Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers.

Cables and jacks. I thought back too, to the kid’s demeanour and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.

“Sure,” I said. “Always good to have someone to talk to, right?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rain bowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.

Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.

TWENTY-THREE

Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.

You start by noticing detail—the arched root system of a tepes thicket, breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mudbank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.

You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go … hurry …

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her, her, her, her …

Her. Sylvie, maned in silver grey. Her face—

Her face, subtly changed by the woman who had crept out and stolen it from her. Her voice, subtly modulated …

I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back.

Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.

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.

She wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests.

Todor Murakami’s lean, attentive features on the ferry. Pipe smoke, whipped away in the wind.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime. Why you going up north again?

It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

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

Stop fucking calling me that.

And screams. And gaping holes cut in spines at neck height. And the weight of cortical stacks in my palm, still slick with clinging gore. And the hollow that would never be filled.

Sarah.

The job in hand.

I’m trying to fucking help.

… hurry …

I’m trusting you …

I’m trying to fucking …

… hurry …

I’m TRYING—

“Coastline.” Suzi Petkovski’s voice rinsed through the cabin speaker, laconic and firm enough to grab at. “Be hitting Sourcetown in fifteen.”

I dumped my brooding and looked left where the Kossuth coast was slicing back towards us. It raised as a dark bumpy line on the otherwise featureless horizon, then seemed to leap in and resolve as a procession of low hills and the occasional flash of white dunes beyond and between. The backside of Vchira, the drowned nubs of an ancient mountain range worn down geological ages past to a seven-hundred-kilometre curve of marsh fringed tidal barrier on one side and the same stretch of crystalline white sand on the other.

Some day, one of Sourcetown’s long-term inhabitants had informed me nearly half a century ago, the sea’s going to break through all along here. Break through and pour into the Weed Expanse like an invading army breaching a long disputed frontier. Wear down the last remaining bastions and wreck the beach. Some Day, man, the Sourcetowner repeated slowly, and capitalised the phrase and grinned at me with what I’d already come to recognise as typical surfer detachment, Some Day, but Not Yet. And until Yet, you just got to keep looking out to sea, man. Just keep looking out there, don’t look behind you, don’t worry what’s keeping it all in place.

Some Day, but Not Yet. Just look out to sea.

You could call it a philosophy, I suppose. On Vchira Beach, it often passed for one. Limited maybe, but then I’ve seen far worse ways of relating to the universe deployed elsewhere.

The sky had cleared up as we reached the southern fringes of the Expanse and I started to see signs of habitation in the sunlight. Source town isn’t really a place, it’s an approximation, a loose term for a hundred-and-seventy-kilometre coastal strip of surfer support services and their associated infrastructure. In its most tenuous form, it comes into being as scattered tents and bubblefabs along the beach, generational fire-circles and barbecue sites, roughly woven belaweed shacks and bars. Settlement permanence increases and then decreases as the Strip approaches and then passes the places where the surf is not merely good but phenomenal. And then, in the Big Surf zones, habitation thickens to an almost municipal density. Actual streets appear on the hills behind the dunes, rooted street lighting along them and clusters of evercrete platforms and jetties sprouting backwards off the spine of land and into the Weed Expanse. Last time I’d been here, there were five such accretions, each with its gang of enthusiasts who swore that the best surf on the continent was right fucking here, man. For all I knew, any one of them could have been correct. For all I knew, there’d be another five by now.

No less subject to flux were the inhabitants themselves. There were population cycles in lazy motion all the way along the Strip—some of them geared to the turn of Harlan’s World’s five seasons, some to the complicated rhythm of the trilunar tides, and some to the longer, languid pulse of a functional surfer sleeve’s lifetime. People came and went and came back. Sometimes their locational loyalties to a part of the beach endured from cycle to cycle, lifetime to lifetime, sometimes they shifted.

And sometimes, that loyalty was never there to begin with.

Finding someone on the Strip was never going to be easy. In a lot of cases, that was the reason people came here.

“Kem Point coming up.” Petkovski’s voice again, against a backdrop of downwinding turbines. She sounded tired. “This good for you?”

“Yeah, as good as anywhere. Thanks.” I peered out at the approaching evercrete platforms and the low-rise tangle of buildings they held up over the waters of the Expanse, the untidy sprawl of structure marching up the hill beyond. There were a handful of figures sitting in view on balconies or jetties, but for the most part the little settlement looked emptied of life. I had no idea if this was the right end of Sourcetown or not, but you’ve got to start somewhere. I grabbed a handstrap and hauled myself to my feet as the skimmer banked left. Glanced across the cabin at my silent companion.

“Nice talking to you, Mikhail.”

He ignored me, gaze pinned to the window. He’d said nothing the whole time we’d shared the cabin space, just stared morosely out at the vast lack of scenery around us. A couple of times, he’d caught me watching as he scrubbed at his jack sockets, and stopped abruptly with a tightening look on his face. But even then, he said nothing.

I shrugged, was about to swing out onto the railed decking, then thought better of it. I crossed the cabin and propped myself against the glass, interrupting Mikhail Petkovski’s field of vision. He blinked up at me, momentarily surprised out of his self-absorption.

“You know,” I said cheerfully. “You got lucky in the mother stakes. But out there, it’s all guys like me. And we don’t give a flying fuck whether you live or die. You don’t get off your arse and start taking an interest, no one else is going to.”

He snorted. “The fuck’s it got to do with—”

Someone more street would have read my eyes, but this one was too washed out with the wirewant, too puffed up with maternal life support.

I reached easily for his throat, dug in and hauled him out of the seat.

“See what I mean? Who’s going to stop me crushing your larynx now?”

He croaked. “Ma—”

“She can’t hear you. She’s busy up there, earning a living for you both.” I gathered him in. “Mikhail, you are infinitely less important in the scheme of things than her efforts have led you to believe.”

He reached up and tried to unpin my fingers. I ignored the feeble prisings and dug in deeper. He started to look genuinely frightened.

“The way you’re headed,” I told him in conversational tones, “you’re going to end up on a spare-parts tray under low lighting. That’s the only use you are to men like me, and no one else is going to get in our way when we come for you, because you’ve given no one a reason to care. Is that what you want to be? Spare parts and a two-minute rinse and flush?”

He jerked and flapped, face turning purple. Shook his head in violent denial. I held him a couple of moments longer, then loosened my grip and dumped him back in the chair. He gagged and coughed, eyes wide on me and flooded with tears. One hand crept up to massage his throat where I’d marked it. I nodded.

“All this, Mikhail? Going on all around you? This is life.” I leaned closer over him and he flinched. “Take an interest. While you still can.”

The skimmer bumped gently against something. I straightened up and went out onto the side deck into sudden heat and brightness. We were floating amidst a crosswork of weathered mirrorwood jetties secured at strategic intervals by heavy evercrete mooring buttresses. The skimmer’s motors kept up a low mutter and gentle pressure against the nearest landing stage. Late afternoon sun glinted hard off the mirrorwood. Suzi Petkovski was standing up in the cockpit and squinting against the reflected light.

“That’ll be double,” she reminded me.

I handed over a chip and waited while she ran it. Mikhail chose not to emerge from the cabin. Maybe he was thinking things over. His mother handed me back the chip, shaded her eyes and pointed.

“They got a place you can hire bugs cheap about three streets over. By that transmission mast you can see. The one with the dragon flags.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. Hope you find what you’re looking for here.”

I skipped the bug hire, at least initially, and wandered up through the little town, soaking up my surroundings. Up to the crest of the hill, I could have been in any Expanse-side suburb of Newpest. The same utilitarian architecture predominated, the same frontage mix of waterware mech- and soft shops mingling with eating houses and bars. The same stained and worn fused-glass streets and the same basic smells. But from the top of the rise looking down, the resemblance ended like waking from a dream.

Below me, the other half of the settlement fell away downward in haphazard structures built out of every material you could readily bring to mind. Bubblefabs rubbed shoulders with woodframe houses, driftwood shacks and, towards the bottom, actual canvas tents. The fused-paving thoroughfares gave way to poorly laid evercrete slabs, then to sand, then finally to the broad, pale sweep of the beach itself. Here there was more movement on the streets than on the Expanse side, most of it semi-clad and drifting towards the shoreline in the late sun. Every third figure had a board slung under one arm. The sea itself was burnished a dirty gold in the low angle light and flecked with activity, surfers floating astride their boards or upright and cutting casual slices across the gently flexing surface of the water. The sun and distance turned them all to anonymous black tin cutouts.

“Some fucking view, eh sam?”

It was a high, child’s voice, at odds with the words it uttered. I glanced round and saw a boy of about ten watching me from a doorway. Body rib thin and bronzed in a pair of surfslacks, eyes a sun-faded blue. Hair a tangled mess from the sea. He was leaned in the door, arms folded nonchalantly across his bared chest. Behind him in the shop, I saw racked boards. Shifting screen displays for acquatech software.

“I’ve seen worse,” I admitted.

“First time at Vchira?”

“No.”

Disappointment notched his voice. “Not looking for lessons then?”

“No.” I paused a moment, measuring advisability. “You been long on the Strip yourself?”

He grinned. “All my lives. Why?”

“I’m looking for some friends. Thought you might know them.”

“Yeah? You a cop? Enforcer?”

“Not recently.”

It seemed to be the right answer. His grin came back.

“They got names, these friends?”

“They did last time I was here. Brasil. Ado, Tres.” I hesitated. “Vidaura, maybe.”

His lips twisted and pursed and he sucked his teeth. It was all gesture learnt in another, much older body.

“Jack Soul Brasil?” he asked warily.

I nodded.

“You a Bug?”

“Not recently.”

“Multiflores crew?”

I drew breath. “No.”

“BaKroom Boy?”

“Do you have a name?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Sure. Milan. Round here they call me Gungetter.”

“Well, Milan,” I told him evenly. “You’re beginning to irritate the fuck out of me. Now are you going to be able to help me or not? You know where Brasil is, or are you just getting off on the rep vapour he trailed through here thirty years back?”

“Hey.” The pale blue eyes narrowed. His arms unfolded, fists tensed to small hammers at his sides. “You know, I fucking belong here, sam. I surf. Been shooting curls at Vchira since before you were a fucking splatter up your mother’s tube.”

“I doubt that, but let’s not quibble. I’m looking for Jack Soul Brasil. I’ll find him with or without you, but you can maybe save me some time. Question is, are you going to?”

He stared back at me, still angry, stance still aggressive. In the ten year old sleeve, it was less than impressive.

“Question is, sam, what’s it worth to help you?”

“Ah.”

Paid, Milan was forthcoming in grudging fragments designed to disguise and eke out the very limited nature of his knowledge. I bought him rum and coffee in a street café across from the shop he was tending—can’t just close it up, sam, be more than my job’s worth—and waited out the storytelling process. Most of what he told me was readily identifiable as well-worn beach legend, but from a couple of things he said I decided he really had met Brasil a few times, maybe even surfed with him. The last encounter seemed to have been a decade or so back. Side-by-side empty handed combat heroism in confrontation with a gang of encroaching Harlan Loyalist surfers a few klicks south from Kem Point. Facedown and general battery, Milan acquits himself with modestly understated savagery, collects a few wounds—you should have seen the fucking scars on that sleeve, man, sometimes I still miss it—but the highest praise is reserved for Brasil. Like a fucking swamp panther, sam. Fuckers ripped him in the chest, he didn’t even notice. He tore them all down. Just, like, nothing left when he was done.

Sent them back north in pieces. All followed by orgiastic celebration—bonfire glow and the cries of women in wild orgasm on a surf backdrop.

It was a standard picture, and I’d had it painted for me before by other Vchira enthusiasts in the past. Looking past the more obvious embellishments, I panned out a little useful detail. Brasil had money—all those years with the Little Blues, right. No way he has to scratch a living teaching wobblies, selling boards and training up some fucking Millsport aristo’s spare flesh five years ahead of time—but the man still didn’t hold with clone reincarnation. He’d be wearing good surfer flesh, but I wouldn’t know his face. Look for them fucking scars on his chest, sam. Yes, he still wore his hair long. Current rumour had him holed up in a sleepy beach hamlet somewhere south.

Apparently he was learning to play the saxophone. There was this jazzman, used to play with Csango Junior, who’d told Milan …

I paid for the drinks and got up to go. The sun was gone and the dirty gold sea all but tarnished through to base metal. Across the beach below us, lights were coming to firefly life. I wondered if I’d catch the bug-hire place before it shut.

“So this aristo,” I said idly. “You teach his body to surf for five years, hone the reflexes for him. What’s your end?”

Milan shrugged and sipped at what was left of his rum. He’d mellowed with the alcohol and the payment. “We trade sleeves. I get what he’s wearing in return for this, aged sixteen. So my end’s a thirty-plus aristo sleeve, cosmetic alterations and witnessed exchange, so I don’t try to pass myself off as him, otherwise catalogue intact. Top-of-the-range clone stock, all the peripherals fitted as standard. Sweet deal, huh?”

I nodded absently. “Yeah, if he looks after what he’s wearing, I guess. Aristo lifestyles I’ve seen can make for some pretty heavy wear and tear.”

“Nah, this guy’s in shape. Comes down here on and off to check on his investment, you know, swim and surf a bit. Would have been down this week but that Harlan limo thing put a lock on it. He’s running a little extra weight he could do without, can’t surf for shit of course. But that’ll sort out easy enough when I—”

“Harlan limo thing?” Envoy awareness slithered along my nerves.

“Yeah, you know. Seichi Harlan’s skimmer. This guy’s real close with that branch of the family, had to—”

“What happened to Seichi Harlan’s skimmer?”

“You didn’t hear about this?” Milan blinked and grinned. “Where you been, sam? Been all over the net since yesterday. Seichi Harlan, taking his sons and daughter-in-law across to Rila, the skimmer just wiped out there in the Reach.”

“Wiped out how?”

He shrugged. “They don’t know yet. Whole thing just exploded, footage they showed looks like from the inside. Sank in seconds, what was left of it. They’re still looking for the pieces.”

They’d be lucky. The maelstrom made itself felt a long way in at this time of year and the currents in the Reach were lethally unpredictable.

Sinking fragments of wreckage might get carried for kilometres before they settled. The broken remains of Seichi Harlan and his family could end up in any of a dozen resting places amidst the scattered islets and reefs of the Millsport archipelago. Stack recovery was going to be a nightmare.

My thoughts fled back to Belacotton Kohei and Plex’s take-soaked mutterings. I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. He’d said biological, but on his own admission his knowledge was incomplete. He’d been shut out by high level yakuza rank and the Harlan family retainer, Aiura. Aiura, who ran damage limitation and clean-up for the Harlan family.

Another wisp of detail settled into place in my mind. Drava wrapped in snow. Waiting in Kurumaya’s antechamber, staring disinterestedly through the global news scrolldown. Accidental death of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district.

It wasn’t a connection as such, but Envoy intuition doesn’t work that way. It just goes on piling up the data until you start to see the shape of something in the mass. Until the connections make themselves for you.

I couldn’t see anything yet, but the fragments were singing to me like windchimes in a storm.

That and the tiny insistent pulse of backbeat: hurry, hurry, there isn’t time.

I traded a badly-remembered Vchira handshake with Milan, and set off back up the hill, hurrying.

The bug-hire place was still lit, and staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with surfer physique. He woke up around the eyes for long enough to find out that I wasn’t a wave rider, aspiring or otherwise, and then settled into mechanical client-service mode. Dayjob shielding around the briefly glimpsed inner core that kept him at Vchira, the heat of enthusiasm wrapped carefully back up again for when he could share it with someone who understood. But he set me up competently enough with a garishly coloured single-seat speed bug and showed me the streetmap software with the return points I could use up and down the Strip. At request, he also provided me with a pre-moulded polalloy crash suit and helmet, though you could see his already low opinion of me go through the floor when I asked for it. It seemed there were still a lot of people on Vchira Beach who couldn’t tell risk and idiocy apart.

Yeah, maybe including you, Tak. Done anything safe yourself recently?

Ten minutes later, I was suited up and powering out of Kem Point behind a cone of headlamp glow in the gathering gloom of evening.

Somewhere south, listening for a badly played saxophone.

I’d had better sets of clues to follow, but there was one thing massively in my favour. I knew Brasil, and I knew that if he heard someone was looking for him, he wasn’t likely to hide. He’d come out to deal with it the way you paddled up to a big wave. The way you faced down a spread of Harlan Loyalists.

Make enough noise, and I wouldn’t have to find him.

He’d find me.

Three hours later, I pulled off the highway and into the cold bluish wash of bug-swarmed Angier lamps around an all-night diner and machine shop. Looking back a little wearily, I judged I’d made enough noise. My supply of low-value credit chips was depleted, I was lightly fogged from too much shared drink and smoke up and down the Strip, and the knuckles of my right hand still ached slightly from a badly thrown punch in a beachside tavern where strangers asking after local legends weren’t well regarded.

Under the Angier lamps, the night was pleasantly cool and there were knots of surfers clowning about in the parking area, bottles and pipes in hand. Laughter that seemed to bounce off the darkened distance around the lampglow, someone telling a broken-board story in a high, excited voice. One or two more serious groups gathered around the opened innards of vehicles undergoing repair. Laser cutters flickered on and off, showering weird green or purple sparks off exotic alloys.

I got a surprisingly good coffee at the counter and took it outside to watch the surfers. It wasn’t a culture I’d ever accessed during my youth in Newpest—gang protocols wouldn’t permit a serious commitment to both scuba and wave-riding, and the diving found me first. I never switched allegiances. Something about the silent world beneath the surface drew me. There was a vast, slow-breathing calm down there, a respite from all the street craziness and my own even more jagged home life.

You could bury yourself down there.

I finished the coffee and went back inside the diner. Ramen soup smells wreathed the air and tugged at my guts. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t eaten since a late ship’s breakfast on the bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter with Japaridze. I climbed onto a counter stool and nodded at the same meth-eyed kid I’d bought my coffee from.

“Smells good. What have you got?”

He picked up a battered remote and thumbed it in the general direction of the autochef. Holodisplays sprang up over the various pans. I scanned them and chose a hard-to-spoil favourite.

“Give me the chillied ray. That’s frozen ray, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “You expecting fresh, maybe? Place like this? At that price?”

“I’ve been away.”

But it elicited no response in his meth-stunned face. He just set the autochef in motion and wandered away to the windows, staring out at the surfers as if they were some form of rare and beautiful sealife caught in an aquarium.

I was halfway through my bowl of ramen, when the door opened behind me. No one said anything, but I knew already. I set down the bowl and turned slowly on the stool.

He was on his own.

It wasn’t the face I remembered, not even close. He’d sleeved to fairer and broader features than the last time around, a tangled mane of blonde traced with grey, and cheekbones that owed at least as much to Slavic genes as they did to his predilection for Adoracion custom. But the body wasn’t much different—inside the loose coveralls he wore, he still had the height and slim breadth in chest and shoulders, the tapered waist and legs, the big hands. And his moves still radiated the same casual poise when he made them.

I knew him as certainly as if he’d torn open the coverall to show me the scars on his chest.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” he said mildly. “Do I know you?”

I grinned.

“Hello Jack. How’s Virginia these days?”

TWENTY-FOUR

“I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.”

She sat on the slope of the dune at my side and traced triangles in the sand between her feet with a bottleback prod. She was still wet from the swim, water pearling on sun-darkened skin all over the surfer sleeve, razored black hair spiked damp and uneven on top of her head. The elfin face beneath was taking some getting used to. She was at least ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. Then again, she was probably having the same problem with me. She stared down at the sand as she spoke, features unreadable. She talked hesitantly, the same way she’d woken me in the spare room at dawn, asking if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. She’d had all night to get over the surprise, but she still looked at me in snatched glances, as if it wasn’t allowed.

I shrugged.

“I’m the believable part, Virginia. I’m not the one back from the dead. And don’t call me ‘kid’.”

She smiled a little. “We’re all back from the dead at some point, Tak. Hazards of the profession, remember?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” She stared away down the beach for a while, where the sunrise was still a blurred blood rumour through early morning mist. “So do you believe her?”

“That she’s Quell?” I sighed and scooped up a handful of sand. Watched it trickle away through my fingers and off the sides of my palm. “I believe she believes she is.”

Virginia Vidaura made an impatient gesture. “I’ve met wireheads that believe they’re Konrad Harlan. That isn’t what I asked you.”

“I know what you asked me, Virginia.”

“Then deal with the fucking question,” she said without heat. “Didn’t I teach you anything in the Corps?”

“Is she Quell?” Trace moisture from the swim had left tiny lines of sand still clinging to my palms. I brushed my hands together brusquely. “How can she be, right? Quell’s dead. Vaporised. Whatever your pals back at the house might like to wish for in their political wet dreams.”

She looked over her shoulder, as if she thought they might hear us. Alight have woken and come stretching and yawning down to the beach after us, rested and ready to take violent offence at my lack of respect.

“I can remember a time you might have wished for it too, Tak. A time you might have wanted her back. What happened to you?”

“Sanction IV happened to me.”

“Ah, yes. Sanction IV. Revolution called for a bit more commitment than you’d expected, did it?”

“You weren’t there.”

A small quiet opened up behind the words. She looked away. Brasil’s little band were all nominally Quellists—or neoQuellists at least—but Virginia Vidaura was the only one among them with Envoy conditioning.

She’d had the capacity for willful self-deception gouged out of her in a way that would permit no easy emotional attachment to legend or dogma. She’d have, I reasoned, an opinion worth listening to. She’d have perspective.

I waited. Down the beach, wavecrash kept up a slow, expectant back beat.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”

Her mouth quirked. “Still quoting her though, I see.”

“Paraphrasing. Look, Virginia, you correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no record of any backup up of Nadia Makita ever made. Right?”

“There’s no record of any backup of Takeshi Kovacs either. Seems to be one out there though.”

“Yeah, don’t remind me. But that’s the fucking Harlan family, and you can see a rationale for why they’d do it. You can see the value.”

She looked sidelong at me. “Well, it’s good to see your time on Sanction IV didn’t damage your ego.”

“Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have uses. It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.”

“Hardly plankton-standard.” She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. “Takeshi, you know Yaros and I …”

“Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.”

“Really?”

“Well, what he really said was ah fuck it, but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?”

She sighed. “No. It didn’t.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There’s no point, it was all so long ago.” A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. “I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.”

I shrugged. “We must be prepared to live on timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realise our own dreams.”

This rime the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.

“You trying to be fucking funny?”

“No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—”

“Shut up, Tak.”

The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognise them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—

Well, never mind.

I shut up. Listened to the waves.

A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and grey, but all the way up four storeys of seaward facing rooms, the windows winked broadly at us.

An off-note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.

“Ouch.” I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.

“At least he’s trying,” she said obscurely.

“Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.”

She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.

“You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like round here?”

Surfers.

You’ll find them pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World, because pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World there’s an ocean that throws waves to die for. And to die for has a couple of meanings here. 0.8G, remember, and three moons—you can ride a wave along some parts of Vchira for half a dozen kilometres at a time, and the height of the things some of these guys get up on has to be seen to be believed. But the low gravity and the trilunar tug has its flip side, and the oceans on Harlan’s World run current systems like nothing ever seen on Earth. Chemical content, temperature and flow all vary alarmingly and the sea does bitchy, unforgiving things with very little warning. The turbulence theorists are still getting to grips with a lot of it, back in their modelled simulations.

Out on Vchira Beach, they’re doing a different kind of research. More than once I’ve seen the Young effect played out to perfection on a seemingly stable nine-metre face, like some Promethean myth in frame advance—the perfect rising shoulder of water eddies and stumbles drunkenly under the rider, then shatters apart as if caught by artillery frag fire. The sea opens its throat, swallows the board, swallows the rider. I’ve helped pull the survivors from the surf a few times. I’ve seen the dazed grins, the glow that seems to come off their faces as they say things like I didn’t think that bitch was ever going to get off my chest or man, did you see that shit come apart on me or most often of all, urgently, did you get my plank out okay, sam. I’ve watched them go back out again, the ones that didn’t have dislocated or broken limbs or cracked skulls from the wipeout, and I’ve watched the gnawing want in the eyes of the ones who have to wait to heal.

I know the feeling well enough. It’s just that I tend to associate it with trying to kill people other than myself.

“Why us?” Mari Ado asked with the blunt lack of manners she obviously thought went with her offworld name.

I grinned and shrugged.

“Couldn’t think of anyone else stupid enough.”

She took a feline kind of offence at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that, it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.

“Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction IV.”

Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.

Ado glanced sideways. “Don’t you think, Sierra?”

Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty.

The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue colourwashed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than the spray-on swimwear and some cheap jewellery. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten.

But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.

Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylised grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.

I cleared my throat.

“You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction IV’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.”

As an insult, it was as unjust as it was complex. Mari Ado, ex of the Little Blue Bugs, was criminally competent in a number of insurgency roles that had nothing to do with wavecraft, and for that matter no less well endowed physically than a number of the other female bodies in the room, Virginia Vidaura included. But I knew she was sensitive about her shape, and unlike Virginia or myself, she’d never been offworld. In effect I’d called her a local yokel, a surf nerd, a cheap source of sexual service and sexually unappealing all in one. Doubtless Isa, had she been there to witness it, would have yipped with delight.

I’m still a little sensitive myself where Sanction IVs concerned.

Ado looked back across the table to the big oak armchair at the end.

“Throw this motherfucker out, Jack.”

“No.” It was a low drawl, almost sleepy. “Not at this stage.”

He sprawled almost horizontal in the dark wood seat, legs stretched out in front of him, face drooping forward, opened hands pressed loosely one on top of the other in his lap, almost as if he was trying to read his own palm.

“He’s being rude, Jack.”

“So were you.” Brasil curled himself upright and forward in the chair.

His eyes met mine. A faint sweat beaded his forehead. I recognised the cause. Fresh sleeve notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much. He hadn’t given up his bad habits.

“But she’s got a point, Kovacs. Why us? Why would we do this for you?”

“You know damn well this isn’t for me,” I lied. “If the Quellist ethic isn’t alive on Vchira, then tell me where the fuck else I go looking for it. Because time is short.”

A snort from down the table. A young male surfer I didn’t know. “Man, you don’t even know if this is Quell we’re talking about. Look at you, you don’t even believe it yourself. You want us to go up against the Harlan family for the sake of a glitch in some deCom psychobitch’s fucked up head? No way, sam.”

There were a couple of mutterings I took for assent. But the majority stayed silent and watched me.

I hooked the young surfer’s gaze. “And your name is?”

“Fuck’s it to you, sam?”

“This is Daniel,” said Brasil easily. “He’s not been here long. And yes, you’re looking at his real age there. Listening to it too, I’m afraid.”

Daniel flushed and looked betrayed.

“Fact remains, Jack. We’re talking about Rila Crags here. No one ever got inside there without an invitation.”

A smile tripped like lightning from Brasil to Virginia Vidaura and on to Sierra Tres. Even Mari Ado chortled sourly into her coffee.

“What? Fucking what?”

I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. “I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.”

“Natsume,” said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. “Name mean anything to you?”

The look she got back was answer enough.

“Nikolai Natsume.” Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. “Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.”

“That’s a real story?” I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. “I thought it was a propaganda myth.”

Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. “Hey, Natsume never got inside.”

“Yeah, he did,” said Ado. “You don’t want to believe that crap they sell in school these days. He—”

“We can discuss Natsume’s achievements later,” said Brasil mildly.

“For now it’s enough that if we have to crack Rila, the precedent already exists.”

There was a brief pause. The surfer who hadn’t believed in Natsume’s existence outside legend was whispering in Daniel’s ear.

“Okay, that’s fine,” said someone else finally, “But if the Harlan family have got this woman, whoever she is, is there any point in mounting a raid? Interrogation tech they’ve got up at Rila, they’ll have cracked her by now.”

“Not necessarily.” Virginia Vidaura leaned forward across her cleared plate. Small breasts moved under her sprayon. It was strange seeing her in the surfer uniform too. “DeCom are running state-of-the-art gear and more capacity than most AI mainframes. They’re built as well as the wetware engineers know how. Supposed to be able to beat Martian naval intelligence systems, remember. I think even good interrogation software is going to look pretty sick against that.”

“They could just torture her,” said Ado, returning to her seat. “This is the Harlans we’re talking about.”

I shook my head. “If they try that, she can just withdraw into the command systems. And besides, they need her coherent at complicated levels. Inflicting short-term pain isn’t going to get them there.”

Sierra Tres lifted her head.

“You say she’s talking to you?”

“I think so, yes.” I ignored a couple more disbelieving noises from down the table. “At a guess, I’d say she’s managed to use her deCom gear to hook into a phone I used to call one of her crew a while back. Probably a residual trace in the team net system, she could run a search for it. But he’s dead now and it’s not a good connection.”

Hard laughter from a couple of the company, Daniel included. I memorised their faces.

Maybe Brasil noticed. He gestured for quiet.

“Her team are all dead, right?”

“Yes. That’s what I was told.”

“Four deComs, in a camp full of deComs.” Mari Ado made a face.

“Slaughtered just like that? Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“I don’t—”

She talked over me. “That they’d let it happen, I mean. This, what’s his name, Kurumaya was it? Old-school deCom big daddy, he’s going to just let the Harlanites walk in and do that under his nose? And what about the rest of them? Doesn’t say much for their esprit de corps, does it?”

“No,” I said evenly. “It doesn’t. DeCom runs as a competition-based nail-it-and-cash-in bounty dynamic. The crews are tight-knit internally. Outside of that, from what I saw there’s not a lot of loyalty. And Kurumaya will have bowed to whatever oligarchy pressure was brought to bear, probably after the event. Sylvie’s Slipins never did themselves any favours with him, certainly not enough for him to buck the hierarchy.”

Ado curled her lip. “Sounds charming.”

“Signs of the times,” said Brasil unexpectedly. He looked at me. “When you strip away all the higher loyalties, we inevitably fall back on fear and greed. Right?”

In the wake of the quote, no one said anything. I scanned the faces in the room, trying to reckon support against dislike and the shades of grey between. Sierra Tres cranked one expressive eyebrow and stayed silent.

Sanction IV, fucking Sanction IV, hung in the air about me. You could make a good case for my actions there being governed by fear and greed.

Some of the faces I was watching already had.

Then again, none of them were there.

None of them were fucking there.

Brasil stood up. He searched the faces around the table, maybe for the same things I’d been looking at.

“Think about this, all of you. It will affect us all, one way or the other. Each one of you is here because I trust you to keep your mouth shut, and because if there’s something to be done I trust you to help me do it. There’ll be another meeting tonight at sundown. There’ll be a vote. Like I said, give it some thought.”

Then he picked up his saxophone from a stool by the window and ambled out of the room as if there was nothing more important going on in his life at that moment.

After a couple of seconds, Virginia Vidaura got up and went out after him.

She didn’t look at me at all.

TWENTY-FIVE

Brasil found me again later, on the beach.

He came trudging up out of the surf with the board slung under one arm, body stripped to shorts, scar tissue and spray-on ankle boots, raking the sea out of his hair with his free hand. I lifted an arm in greeting and he broke into a jog towards where I sat in the sand. No mean feat after the hours he’d had in the water. When he reached me, he was barely breathing heavily.

I squinted up at him in the sun. “Looks like fun.”

“Try?” He touched the surfboard, angled it towards me. Surfers don’t do that, not with a board they’ve owned any longer than a couple of days. And this one looked older than the sleeve that was carrying it.

Jack Soul Brasil. Even here on Vchira Beach, there was no one else much like him.

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

He shrugged, dug the board into the sand and flopped down beside me.

Water sprang off him in droplets. “Suit yourself. Good swell out there today. Nothing too scary.”

“Must be dull for you.”

A broad grin. “Well that’s the trap, isn’t it.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is.” He gestured out to sea. “Get in the water, you do every wave for what it’s worth. Lose that, you might as well go back to Newpest. Leave Vchira for good.”

I nodded. “Get many like that?”

“The burnouts? Yeah, some. But leaving’s okay. It’s the ones who stay on that hurt to look at.”

I glanced at the scar tissue on his chest.

“You’re such a sensitive guy, Jack.”

He smiled out at the sea. “Trying to be.”

“That why you won’t do the clone thing, huh? Wear every sleeve for what it’s worth?”

“Learn every sleeve for what it’s worth,” he corrected me gently. “Yeah. Plus you wouldn’t believe what clone storage costs these days, even in Newpest.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother Ado or Tres.”

He grinned again. “Mari’s got an inheritance to spend. You know what her real name is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I remember. And Tres?”

“Sierra knows people in the trade. When the rest of us packed in the Bug stuff, she went on contracting for the haiduci for a while. She’s owed some favours up in Newpest.”

He shivered slightly, let it run up to a shudder that twitched his shoulders. Sneezed suddenly.

“Still doing that shit, I see. Is that why Ado’s so thin?”

He looked at me oddly. “Ado’s thin because she wants to be thin. How she goes about it is her business, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged. “Sure. I’m just curious. I figured you guys would have got bored with self-infection by now.”

“Ah, but you never liked it in the first place, did you? I remember last time you were here, when Mari tried to sell you on that batch of HHF we had. You always were a little puritanical on the subject.”

“I just never saw the point of making myself ill for fun. Thought as a trained medic, you’d be at least that smart too.”

“I’ll remind you of that next time we’re sharing a bad tetrameth comedown. Or a single-malt hangover.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re right.” He nodded sagely. “That chemical shit is Stone-Age stuff. I ran Hun Home flu against a spec-inhibited immune system for ten years and all I got was buzz and some really cool delirium dreams. Real waveclimbers. No headaches, no major organ damage, not even a runny nose once the inhibitors and the virus meshed. Tell me one drug you could do that with.”

“Is that what you’re running these days? HHF?”

He shook his head. “Not for a long time. Virginia got us some Adoracion custom a while back. Engineered spinal-fever complex. Man, you should see my dreams now. Sometimes I wake up screaming.”

“I’m happy for you.”

For a while, we both watched the figures in the water. A couple of times Brasil grunted and pointed out something in the way one of the surfers moved. None of it meant very much to me. Once he applauded softly as someone wiped out, but when I glanced at him, there was no apparent mockery in his face.

A little later he asked me again, gesturing at the pegged board.

“You sure you don’t want to try out? Take my plank? Man, that mothballed shit you’re wearing looks practically made for it. Odd for military custom, come to think of it. Kind of light.” He prodded idly at my shoulder with a couple of fingers. “In fact I’d say that’s near-perfect sports sleeve trim you’re carrying. What’s the label?”

“Ah, some defunct bunch, never heard of them before. Eishundo.”

“Eishundo?”

I glanced at him, surprised. “Yeah, Eishundo Organics. You know them?”

“Fuck, yeah.” He scooted back in the sand and stared at me. “Tak, that’s a design classic you’re wearing. They only ever built the one series, and it was a century ahead of its time at least. Stuff no one had ever tried before. Gekko grip, recabled muscle structure, autonomic survival systems like you wouldn’t believe.”

“No, I would.”

He wasn’t listening. “Flexibility and endurance through the roof, reflex wiring you don’t start to see again until Harkany got started back in the early three hundreds. Man, they just don’t build them like that any more.”

“They certainly don’t. They went bust, didn’t they?”

He shook his head vehemently. “Nah, that was politics. Eishundo was a Drava co-operative, set up in the eighties, typical Quiet Quellist types except I don’t think they ever made any big secret of the fact. Would have been shut down probably, but everyone knew they made the best sport sleeves on the planet and they ended up supplying half the brats in the First Families.”

“Handy for them.”

“Yeah, well. Like I said, there was nothing to touch them.” The enthusiasm leached from his face. “Then, with the Unsettlement, they declared for the Quellists. Harlan family never forgave them for that. When it was over they blacklisted everyone who’d ever worked for Eishundo, even executed a few of the senior biotech guys as traitors and terrorists. Providing arms to the enemy, all that tired line of shit. Plus, with the way things turned out at Drava, they were pretty fucked anyway. Man, I can’t believe you’re sitting there wearing that thing. It’s a fucking piece of history, Tak.”

“Well, that’s good to know.”

“You sure you don’t want to—”

“Sell it to you? Thanks, no, I’ll—.”

“Surf, man. You sure you don’t want to surf? Take the plank out and get wet? Find out what you can do in that thing?”

I shook my head. “I’ll just live with the suspense.”

He looked at me curiously for a while. Then he nodded and went back to watching the sea. You could feel the way just watching it did something for him. Balanced out the fever he’d set raging inside himself. I tried, a little grimly, not to feel envy.

“So maybe some other time,” he said quietly. “When you’re not carrying so much.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” It wasn’t any other time I could usefully imagine, unless he was talking about the past, and I couldn’t see any way to get back there.

He seemed to want to talk.

“You never did this stuff at all, did you? Even back in Newpest?”

I shrugged. “I know how to fall off a plank, if that’s what you mean. Did the local beaches for a couple of summers when I was a kid. Then I started hanging out with a crew and they were strictly subaqua. You know how it goes.”

He nodded, maybe remembering his own Newpest youth. Maybe remembering the last time we’d had this conversation, but I wouldn’t count on it. The last time we’d talked about it was fifty-odd years ago, and if you don’t have Envoy recall, that’s a long time and a lot of conversations past.

“Fucking stupid,” he muttered. “Who’d you run with?”

“Reef Warriors. Hirata chapter, mostly. Dive Free, Die Free. Leave the Scum on the Surface. We would have cut up guys like you as soon as look at you back then. What about you?”

“The? Oh, I thought I was a real fucking free spirit. Stormriders, Standing Wave, Vchira Dawn Chorus. Some others, I don’t remember them all now.” He shook his head. ”So fucking stupid.”

We watched the waves.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked him.

He stretched and tipped his head back towards the sun, eyes clenched shut. A sound like a cat purring made its way up out of his chest, broke finally into a chuckle.

“Here on Vchira? I don’t know, I don’t keep track. Got to be close to a century by now, I guess. On and off.”

“And Virginia says the Bugs folded two decades back.”

“Yeah, near enough. Like I said, Sierra still gets out and about occasionally. But most of the rest of us haven’t been in worse than a beach brawl for ten, twelve years.”

“Let’s hope you haven’t got rusty then.”

He flipped another grin at me. “You take a lot for granted.”

I shook my head. “No, I just listen carefully. This will affect us all, one way or the other? You got that right. You’re going to go with this, whatever the others do. You think it’s for real.”

“Oh yeah?” Brasil lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes. “Well, here’s something you might want to think about then. Something you probably don’t know. Back when the Quellists were fighting the First Families for continental dominance of New Hokkaido, there was a lot of talk about government death squads targeting Quell and the other Contingency Committee names. Sort of counterblow to the Black Brigades. So you know what they did?”

“Yeah, I know.”

He squinted an eye open. “You do?”

“No. But I don’t like rhetorical questions. You’re going to tell me something, get on and tell me.”

He closed his eyes again. I thought something like pain passed over his face.

“Alright. Do you know what data shrapnel is?”

“Sure.” It was an old term, almost outmoded. “Cheap virals. Stone-Age IF stuff. Bits of cannibalised standard code in a broadcast matrix. You lob them into enemy systems and they try to carry out whatever looped functions they were for originally. Clogs up the operating code with inconsistent commands. That’s the theory, anyway. I hear it doesn’t work all that well.”

In fact, I knew the limitations of the weapon pretty well at first hand.

Final resistance on Adoracion a hundred and fifty years ago had broadcast data shrapnel to slow down the Envoy advance across the Manzana Basin, because it was all they had left. It hadn’t slowed us down all that much.

The furious hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the covered streets of Neruda had hurt us far more. But Jack Soul Brasil, with his adopted name and passion for a culture whose planet he’d never seen, didn’t need to hear about that right now.

He shifted his long body on the sand.

“Yeah, well, the New Hokkaido contingency committee didn’t share your scepticism. Or maybe they were just desperate. Anyway, they came up with something similar based on digitised human freight. They built shell personalities for each committee member, just a surface assembly of basic memory and self—”

“Oh you are fucking kidding me!”

“—and loaded them into widecast datamines, to be deployed inside the Quellist sectors and triggered if they were overrun. No, I’m not kidding you.”

I closed my own eyes.

Oh fuck.

Brasil’s voice ticked onward, remorseless. “Yeah, plan was, in the event of a rout, they’d trigger the mines and leave a few dozen of their own defenders, maybe the vanguard units of the encroaching forces as well, each solidly convinced they were Quellcrist Falconer. Or whoever.”

Sound of waves, and distant cries across the water.

Would you mind holding me while I go under?

I saw her face. I heard the changed voice that wasn’t Sylvie Oshima.

Touch me. Tell me you’re fucking real.

Brasil was still going, but you could hear him winding down. “Quite a smart weapon when you think about it. Widespread confusion, who the fuck do you trust, who do you arrest? Chaos, really. Maybe it buys time for the real Quell to get out. Maybe just. Creates chaos. The final blow. Who knows?”

When I opened my eyes again, he was sitting up and staring out to sea again. The peace and the humour in his face was gone, wiped away like make-up, like seawater dried off in the sun. Out of nowhere, inside the tight muscled surfer physique, he looked suddenly bitter and angry.

“Who told you all that?” I asked him.

He glanced back at me and the ghost of his former smile flickered.

“Someone you need to meet,” he said quietly.

We took his bug, a stripped-down two-seat not much bigger than the single I’d rented but, as it turned out, far faster. Brasil took the trouble to pull on a battered-looking pantherskin crash suit, something else that marked him out as different from all the other idiots cruising up and down the highway in swimwear at speeds that would flay flesh to the bone if they spilled and rolled.

“Yeah, well,” he said, when I mentioned it. “Some chances are worth taking. The rest is just deathwish.”

I picked up my polalloy helmet and moulded it on. My voice came through the speaker tinnily.

“Got to watch that shit, huh?”

He nodded. “All the time.”

He cranked the bug up, settled his own helmet and then kicked us down the highway at an even two hundred kilometres an hour, heading north.

Back along the path I’d already traced looking for him. Past the all-night diner, past the other stops and knots of population where I’d scattered his name like blood around a bottleback charter boat, back through Kem Point and further. In daylight, the Strip lost a lot of its romance. The tiny hamlets of window light I’d passed going south the previous evening showed up as sunblasted utilitarian low rises and ‘fabs. Neon and holosigns were switched off or bleached out to near invisibility. The dunetown settlements shed their cosy main-street-at-night appeal and became simple accretions of structure on either side of a detritus-strewn highway. Only the sound of the sea and the fragrances in the air were the same, and we were going too fast to register them.

Twenty kilometres north of Kem Point a small, badly-paved side road led away into the dunes. Brasil throttled back for the turn, not as much as I would have liked, and took us off the highway. Sand boiled from under the bug, scoured out from around the irregular chunks of evercrete and off the bedrock the road had been laid over. With grav-effect vehicles, paving is often as much about signalling where the path goes as providing an actual surface. And just over the first line of dunes, whoever had laid this track had abandoned the effort in favour of illuminum and carbon-fibre marker poles driven into the ground at ten-metre intervals. Brasil let our speed bleed off and we cruised sedately along the trail of poles as it snaked seaward through the sand scape. A couple of dilapidated bubblefabs appeared along the route, pitched at unlikely angles on the slopes around us. It wasn’t clear if anyone was living in them. Further on, I saw a combat-rigged skimmer parked under a tented dust canopy in a shallow defile. Spiderlike watchdog systems like miniature karakuri flexed themselves awake on its upper surfaces at the sound of the bug’s engine or maybe the heat we gave off. They raised a couple of limbs in our direction, then settled down again as we passed.

We crested the final set of dunes, and Brasil stopped the bug sideways on to the sea. He lifted off his helmet, leaned forward on the controls and nodded down the slope.

“There you go. Tell you anything?”

A long time ago, someone had driven an armoured hoverloader up the beach until its nose rammed the line of dunes, and then apparently just left it there. Now the vessel sprawled in its collapsed skirt like a swamp panther that had crouched for approaching prey and then been slaughtered where it lay. The rear steerage vanes had blown round to an angle that suited the prevailing wind, and were apparently jammed there. Sand had crept into the jigsaw lines of the armouring and built up along the facing side of the skirt so the armoured flanks of the ‘loader seemed to be the upper surfaces of a much larger buried structure. The gunports on the side I could see offered blast barrels cranked to the sky, a sure sign that the hydraulic governors were shot. The dorsal hatches were blown back as if for evacuation.

On the side of the central fuselage, up near the blister of the bridge, I spotted traces of colour. Black and red, wound together in a familiar pattern that touched me in the spine with a cold hand; the time-abraded traces of a stylised Quellcrist frond.

“Oh, no way.”

“Yeah.” Brasil shifted in the bug’s saddle. “That’s right.”

“Has this been here since …?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

We rode the bug down the dune and dismounted near the tail end.

Brasil cut the power and the vehicle sank to the sand like an obedient seal.

The ‘loader bulked above us, smart metal armour soaking up the heat of the sun so there was a faint chill close up. At three points along the pitted flank, access ladders led down from the edge of the skirt rail and buried their feet in the sand. The one at the rear, where the vessel had tilted towards the ground, was angled outward and almost horizontal. Brasil ignored it, grabbed at the skirt rail and levered himself up onto the deck above with effortless grace. I rolled my eyes and followed suit.

The voice caught me as I straightened up.

“So is this him?”

I blinked in the sun and made out a slight figure ahead of us on the lightly canted deck. He stood about a head shorter than Brasil and wore a simple grey coverall whose sleeves were hacked off at the shoulders. From the features below the sparse white hair, he had to be in his sixties at least, but the exposed arms were ropey with muscle and ended in big, bony hands. And the soft voice had a corded strength behind it. There was a tension to the question that approached hostility.

I stepped forward to join Brasil. Mirrored the way the old man stood with his hands hanging at his sides like weapons he might need. Met his eyes incuriously.

“Yeah, I’m him.”

His gaze seemed to flinch downward, but it wasn’t that. He was looking me over. There was a moment of silence.

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“Yes.” My voice softened a fraction. I’d misread the tension in him. It wasn’t hostility. “I’ve spoken to her.”

Inside the hoverloader, there was an unexpected sense of space and natural light. Combat vessels of this sort are usually pretty cramped, but Soseki Koi had had a lot of time to change all that. Bulkheads had been ripped out and in places the upper level deck had been peeled back to create five metre light wells. The sun poured in through the few vision ports and the opened dorsal hatches, blasted its way elsewhere between cracked armouring that might have been battle damage or deliberate modification. A riot of plantlife clustered about these opened areas, spilling out of hung baskets and twining up exposed struts in the skeleton of the fuselage. Illuminum panelling had been carefully replaced in some areas, left to decay in others.

Somewhere not visible, waterflow over rocks chuckled in patient counterpoint to the bassline pounding of the surf outside.

Koi got us seated on padded matting around a low, formally-set table at the bottom of one of the light wells. He served us with traces of old school ceremony from the ‘loader’s autochef, which sat on a shelf behind him and still seemed to be working pretty well. To the selection of grilled meat and pan noodles, he added a pot of belaweed tea and fruit grown from the plants overhead—vine plums and thick, thirty-centimetre lengths of Kossuth chainberry. Brasil dug into everything with the enthusiasm of a man who’d been in the water all day. I picked at my food, took just enough to be polite apart from the chainberry, which was some of the best I’d ever tasted. Koi held himself rigidly back from questions while we ate.

Eventually, Brasil tossed the stripped threads of his last piece of chainberry onto his plate, wiped his fingers on a napkin and nodded at me.

“Tell him. I gave him the highlights, but it’s your story.”

“I—” I looked across the table of devastated food and saw the hunger that sat there. ”Well. It’s a while back now. A few months. I was up in Tekitomura, on. Business. I was in this bar down on the waterfront, Tokyo Crow. She was—”

It felt strange, telling it. Strange, and if I was honest, very distant.

Listening to my own voice now, I suddenly had a hard time myself believing the path I’d tracked from that night of splattered blood and screaming hallucinations, out across the machine-haunted wastes of New Hok and back south again, running from a doppelgänger. Quixotic chivalry in wharfside bars, frantic schizophrenic sex and repeated waterborne flight in the company of a mysterious and damaged woman with hair of living steel, mountainside gunbattles with the shards of myself amidst the ruins of our Martian heritage. Sylvie was right when she christened me Micky in the shadows of the crane. It was pure experia.

No wonder Radul Segesvar was having a hard time coming to terms with what I’d done. Told this tale of muddled loyalties and blown-off course rerouting, the man who’d come to him two years previously for backing would have laughed out loud in disbelief.

No, you wouldn’t have laughed.

You would have stared, cold with detachment as you barely listened, and thought about something else. About the next New Revelation slaughter, blood on the blade of a Tebbit knife, a steep-sided pit out in the Weed Expanse and a shrill screaming that goes on and on …

You would have shrugged the story away, true or not, content with what you had instead.

But Koi drank it in without a word. When I paused and looked at him, he asked no questions. He waited patiently and once, when I seemed to have stalled, he made a single, gentle gesture for me to continue. Finally, when I was done, he sat for a while and then nodded to himself.

“You say she called you names when she first came back.”

“Yes.” Envoy recall lifted them from the depths of inconsequential memory for me. “Odisej. Ogawa. She thought I was one of her soldiers, from the Tetsu battalion. Part of the Black Brigades.”

“So.” He looked away, face indecipherable. Voice soft. “Thank you, Kovacs-san.”

Quiet. I exchanged glances with Brasil. The surfer cleared his throat.

“Is that bad?”

Koi drew breath as if it hurt him.

“It isn’t helpful.” He looked at us again and smiled sadly. “I was in the Black Brigades. Tetsu battalion wasn’t part of them, it was a separate front.”

Brasil shrugged. “Maybe she was confused.”

“Yes, maybe.” But the sadness never left his eyes.

“And the names?” I asked him. “Do you recognise them?”

He shook his head. “Ogawa’s not an uncommon name for the north, but I don’t think I knew anyone called that. It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but it doesn’t chime. And Odisej, well,” a shrug, “there’s the kendo sensei, but I don’t think she had a Quellist past.”

We sat in silence for a little while. Finally, Brasil sighed.

“Ah, fuck.”

For some reason, the tiny explosion seemed to animate Koi. He smiled again, this time with a gleam I hadn’t seen in him before.

“You sound discouraged, my friend.”

“Yeah, well. I really thought this might be it, you know. I thought we were really going to do this.”

Koi reached for the plates and began to clear them onto the ledge behind his shoulder. His movements were smooth and economical, and he talked as he worked.

“Do you know what day it is next week?” he asked conversationally.

We both blinked at him.

“No? How unhealthy. How easily we wrap ourselves up in our own concerns, eh? How easily we detach from the wider scheme of life as it’s lived by the majority.” He leaned forward to collect the furthest dishes and I handed them to him. “Thank you. Next week, the end of next week, is Konrad Harlan’s birthday. In Millsport, celebration will be mandatory. Fireworks and festivities without mercy. The chaos of humans at play.”

Brasil got it before me. His face lit up. “You mean …?”

Koi smiled gently. “My friend, for all I know this might well really be it, as you rather cryptically describe it. But whether it is or not, I can tell you now we are really going to do this. Because we really have no other choice.”

It was what I wanted to hear, but I still couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. On the ride south, I’d imagined I might get Brasil and Vidaura, maybe another few of the neoQuell faithful, to weigh in on my side whatever the holes in their wish fulfillment. But Brasil’s data shrapnel story, the way it fitted the New Hok detail and the understanding that it came from someone who knew, who’d been there, the meeting with this small, self contained man and his serious approach to gardening and food—all this was pushing me towards the vertiginous edge of a belief that I’d been wasting my time.

The understanding that I hadn’t was almost as dizzying.

“Consider,” said Koi, and something seemed to have changed in his voice. “Maybe this ghost of Nadia Makita is exactly that, a ghost. But is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough? Has it not already been enough for the oligarchs to panic and disobey the binding covenants of their puppet masters back on Earth? How then can we not do this? How can we not take back from their grip this object of their terror and rage?”

I traded another look with Brasil. Raised an eyebrow.

“This isn’t going to be easy to sell,” the surfer said grimly. “Most of the ex-Bugs will fight if they think it’s Quell they’re going to get, and they’ll talk the others round. But I don’t know if they’ll do it for a woken ghost, however fucking vengeful.”

Koi finished clearing the plates, took up a napkin and examined his hands. He found a ribbon of chainberry juice caught around one wrist and cleaned it off with meticulous attention. His gaze was fixed on the task as he spoke. “I will speak to them, if you wish. But in the end, if they have no conviction of their own, Quell herself wouldn’t ask them to fight, and nor will I.”

Brasil nodded. “Great.”

“Koi.” Suddenly, I needed to know. “Do you think this is a ghost we’re chasing?”

He made a tiny sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh.

“We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we now do, how could we not be.”

Sarah.

I forced it down, wondering if he saw the wince at the edges of my eyes as I did it. Wondering with sudden paranoia if he already somehow knew.

My voice grated coming out.

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

He blinked and suddenly smiled again

“No, it isn’t. You asked me if I believed, and I evaded your question. Forgive me. On Vchira Beach, cheap metaphysics and cheap politics rub shoulders and both are in frequent demand. With a little effort, a passable living can be made from dispensing them, but then the habit becomes hard to break.” He sighed. “Do I believe we are dealing with the return of Quellcrist Falconer? With every fibre of my being I want to, but like any Quellist I am impelled to face the facts. And the facts do not support what I want to believe.”

“It’s not her.”

“It’s not likely. But in one of her less passionate moments, Quell herself once offered an escape clause for situations such as these. If the facts are against you, she said, but you cannot bear to cease believing—then at least suspend judgment. Wait and see.”

“I’d have thought that mitigates pretty effectively against action.”

He nodded. “Mostly it does. But in this case, the issue of what I want to be true has nothing to do with whether we act or not. Because this much I do believe: even if this ghost has no more than talismanic value, its time is here and its place is among us. One way or another, there is a change coming. The Harlanites recognise it as well as we do, and they have already made their move. It only remains for us to make ours. If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.”

That stayed in my head like an echo, long after we left Soseki Koi to his preparations and rode the bug back along the Strip. That, and his simple question. The simple conviction behind it.

Is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough?

But it wasn’t the same for me. Because this ghost I’d held, and I’d watched moonlight across the floor of a cabin in the mountains while she slipped away from me into sleep, not knowing if she’d be waking again.

If she could be woken again, I didn’t want to be the one to tell her what she was. I didn’t want to be there to watch her face when she found out.

TWENTY-SIX

After that, it went rapidly.

There is thought and there is action, a youngish Quell once said, stealing liberally, I later discovered, from Harlan’s World’s ancient samurai heritage. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins.

Brasil went back to the others and presented Koi’s decision as his own.

There was a splutter of dispute from some of the surfers who still hadn’t forgiven me for Sanction IV, but it didn’t last. Even Mari Ado dropped her hostility like a broken toy as it became clear I was peripheral to the real issue. One by one, in the sunset-painted shade and glow of the common living room, the men and women of Vchira Beach gave their assent.

It seemed that a woken ghost was going to be enough.

The component parts of the raid floated together with a speed and ease that for the more suggestible might have implied the favour of gods or agents of destiny. For Koi, it was simply the flow of historical forces, no more in question than the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. It was a confirmation that the time had come, that the political pot was boiling over. Of course it was going to spill, of course it was all going to fall in the same direction, onto the floor. Where else could it go?

I told him I thought it was luck, and he just smiled.

And it came together anyway.

Personnel:

The Little Blue Bugs. They barely existed any more as an actual entity, but there were enough of the old crew around to form a core that corresponded roughly to legend. Newcomers drawn in over the years by the legend’s gravitational pull sketched an outlined weight of numbers and claimed the nomenclature by association. Over even more years, Brasil had learned to trust some of them. He’d seen them surf and he’d seen them fight. More importantly, he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate. Together, the old and the new, they were as close to a Quellist taskforce as it was possible to get without a time machine.

Weapons:

The casually parked military skimmer in Koi’s backyard was emblematic of a tendency that ran the length and breadth of the Strip. The Bugs weren’t the only heavy-heist types to have taken refuge on Vchira Beach. Whatever it was that drew Brasil and his kind to the waves, it was a general tug that manifested itself just as easily in an enthusiasm for lawbreaking of a dozen different stripes. Sourcetown was awash with retired thugs and revolutionaries and it seemed none of them had ever felt like giving up their toys for good. Shake down the Strip and hardware tumbled out of it like vials and sex toys from the sheets of Mitzi Harlan’s bed.

Planning:

Overrated as far as most of Brasil’s crew were concerned. Rila Crags was almost as notorious as the old secret police headquarters on Shimatsu Boulevard, the one Black Brigade member Iphigenia Deme brought down in smoking rubble when they tried to interrogate her in the basement and triggered her implanted enzyme explosives instead. The desire to do the same thing at Rila was a palpable prickle in the air of the house. It took a while to convince the more passionate among the newly reconfigured Bugs that an all-out assault on the Crags would be suicide of an infinitely less productive form than Deme’s.

“Can’t blame them,” said Koi, his Black Brigade past suddenly glinting in the edge on his voice. “They’ve been waiting long enough for the chance to make someone pay.”

“Daniel hasn’t,” I said pointedly. “He’s barely been alive two decades.”

Koi shrugged. “Rage at injustice is a forest fire—it jumps all divides, even those between generations.”

I stopped wading and looked back at him. You could see how he might be getting carried away. We were both sea-giants out of legend now, knee deep in a virtual ocean amidst the islands and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago at 1:2000 scale. Sierra Tres had called in some haiduci favours and got us time in a high-resolution mapping construct belonging to a firm of marine architects whose commercial management techniques wouldn’t bear too much close legal scrutiny. They weren’t overjoyed about the loan, but that’s what happens when you cosy up with the haiduci.

“Have you ever actually seen a forest fire, Koi?”

Because they sure as hell aren’t common on a world that’s ninety five per cent ocean.

“No.” He gestured. “It was a metaphor. But I have seen what happens when injustice finally triggers retribution. And it lasts for a long time.”

“Yes, I know that.”

I stared away towards the waters of the southern Reach. The construct had reproduced the maelstrom there in miniature, gurgling and grinding and tugging at my legs beneath the surface. If the depth of the water had been to the same scale as the rest of the construct, it probably would have dragged me off my feet.

“And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?”

“Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.” I went on looking into the maelstrom. “During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.”

“I see.” His voice showed no reaction. “Did it work?”

“Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.”

“Yes. And the fire?”

I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. “Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.”

He waded across and looked.

“Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.”

“They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.”

The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.

“Then will he not know to come here?” Koi asked softly. “To Vchira?”

“I don’t think so.” I reran my own second-guessing rationale as I boarded the Haiduci’s Daughter in Tekitomura, hoping it sounded as convincing out loud. “He’s too young to know anything about my time with the Bugs, and there’s no official record they can feed him. Vidaura he knows, but for him she’s still a trainer back in the Corps. He’ll have no feel for what she might be doing now, or any post-service connection we might have. This Aiura bitch will give him what they’ve got on me, maybe on Virginia too. But they don’t have much and what they do have is misleading. We’re Envoys, we both covered our tracks and sewed the dataflows with tinsel every move we made.”

“Very thorough of you.”

I searched the lined face for irony, and found none apparent. I shrugged.

“It’s the conditioning. We’re trained to disappear without trace on worlds we hardly know. Doing it somewhere you grew up is child’s play. All these motherfuckers have got to work with is underworld rumour and a series of sentences in storage. That’s not much to go on with a whole globe to cover and no aerial capacity. And the one thing he probably thinks he knows about me is that I’ll avoid Newpest like the plague.”

I shut down the updraft of family feeling that had stabbed through me on the Haiduci’s Daughter. Let go a compressed breath.

“So where will he look for you?”

I nodded at the model of Millsport in front of us, brooding on the densely settled islands and platforms. “I think he’s probably looking for me right there. It’s where I always came when I wasn’t offworld. It’s the biggest urban environment on the planet, the easiest place to disappear if you know it well, and it’s right across the bay from Rila. If I were an Envoy, that’s where I’d be. Hidden, and in easy striking distance.”

For a moment, my unaccustomed aerial viewpoint grew dizzying as I looked down on the wharflines and streets, unfocused memory down the disjointed centuries blurring the old and new into a smudged familiarity.

And he’s down there somewhere.

Come on, there’s no way you can be sure of—

He’s down there somewhere like an antibody, perfectly shaped to match the intruder he’s looking for, asking soft questions in the flow of city life, bribing, threatening, levering, breaking, all the things that they taught us both so well.

He’s breathing deep as he does it, living it for its own dark and joyous sake like some inverted version of Jack Soul Brasil’s philosophy of life.

Plex’s words came trickling back to me.

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—

I thought back along my train of associations in the last year, the people I might have endangered.

Todor Murakami, if he was still hanging around undeployed. Would my younger self know him? Murakami had joined the Corps almost the same time as I had, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the early days, hadn’t deployed together until Nkrumah’s Land and Innenin. Would Aiura’s pet Kovacs make the connection? Would he be able to play Murakami successfully? Come to that, would Aiura let her newly double-sleeved creation anywhere near a serving Envoy? Would she dare?

Probably not. And Murakami, with the full weight of the Corps behind him, could look after himself.

Isa.

Oh, shit.

Fifteen-year-old Isa, wearing tough-as-titanium woman-of-the-world like a pantherskin jacket over a soft and privileged upbringing among what was left of Millsport’s middle class. Razor-sharp smart, and just as brittle. Like a pretend edition of little Mito, just before I left for the Envoys. If he found Isa then—

Relax, you’re covered. Only place she can put you is in Tekitomura. They get Isa, they’ve got nothing.

But—

It took me that long, that heartbeat, to care. The knowledge of the gap was a cold revulsion welling up through me.

But he’ll break her in half if she gets in his way. He’ll go through her like angelfire.

Will he? If she reminds you of Mho, isn’t she going to remind him too? It’s the same sister for both of you. Isn’t that going to stop him?

Isn’t it?

I cast my mind back into the murk of operational days with the Corps, and didn’t know.

“Kovacs!”

It was a voice out of the sky. I blinked and looked up from the modelled streets of Millsport. Over our heads, Brasil hung in the air of the virtuality clad in garish orange surf shorts and tatters of low-level cloud. With his physique and long fair hair blown back by stratospheric winds, he looked like a disreputable minor god. I raised a hand in greeting.

“Jack, you’ve got to come and look at this northern approach. It isn’t going to—”

“Got no time for that, Tak. You need to bail out. Right now.”

I felt a tightening around my chest. “What is it?”

“Company,” he said cryptically, and vanished in a twist of white light.

The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep, marine architects and fluid dynamic engineers by appointment, were in north Sourcetown, where the Strip started to morph into resort complexes and beaches with safe surf. It wasn’t a part of town any of Brasil’s crew would have been seen dead in under normal circumstances, but they merged competently enough with the tourist hordes. Only someone who was looking for hardcore surfer poise would have spotted it beneath the violently mismatched high-colour branded beachwear they’d adopted like camouflage. In the sober surroundings of a nilvibe conference chamber ten floors up from the promenade, they looked like an outbreak of some exotic anti-corporate fungal infection.

“A priest, a fucking priest?”

“I’m afraid so.” Sierra Tres told me. “Apparently alone, which I understand is unusual for the New Revelation.”

“Unless they’re borrowing tricks from the Sharyan martyr brigades,” said Virginia Vidaura sombrely. “Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels. What have you been up to, Tak?”

“It’s personal,” I muttered.

“Isn’t it always.” Vidaura grimaced and looked around at the assembled company. Brasil shrugged, and Tres showed no more emotion than usual.

But Ado and Koi both looked angrily intent. “Tak, I think we have a right to know what’s going on. This could jeopardise everything we’re working for.”

“It’s got nothing to do with what we’re working for, Virginia. It’s irrelevant. These bearded fucks are too stupid incompetent to touch us. They’re strictly the bottom of the food chain.”

“Stupid or not,” Koi pointed out, “One of them has succeeded in following you here. And is now asking after you in Kem Point.”

“Fine. I’ll go and kill him.”

Mari Ado shook her head. “Not alone, you won’t.”

“Hey, this is my nicking problem, Mari.”

“Tak, calm down.”

“I am fucking calm!”

My shout sank into the nilvibe muffling like pain drowned in IV endorphin. No one said anything for a while. Mari Ado looked pointedly away, out of the window. Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow. Brasil examined the floor with elaborate care. I grimaced and tried again. Quietly.

“Guys, this is my problem, and I would like to deal with it myself.”

“No.” It was Koi. “There is no time for this. We have already spent two days that we can ill afford in preparation. We cannot delay further. Your private vendettas will have to wait.”

“It isn’t going to take—”

“I said no. By tomorrow morning your bearded friend will in any case be looking in entirely the wrong place for you.” The ex-Black Brigade commando turned away, dismissing me the way Virginia Vidaura would sometimes do when we’d performed badly in Envoy training sessions. “Sierra, we’ll need to up the realtime ratio on the construct. Though I don’t imagine it ramps that high anyway, does it?”

Tres shrugged. “Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.”

“That’s fine.” Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. “It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels—the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.”

Tres nodded, already moving. “I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.”

She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.

“Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.”

I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.

“You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?”

Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.

“Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.”

“Yeah, I think we should.”

I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.

The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“You know where I’m going.”

“No.” She tightened up on me. “No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.”

“It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.”

I tried to move towards the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far from reliable option. I swung back towards her, exasperated.

“Virginia, let me go.”

“What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—”

“It isn’t going to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—”

I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own and our eyes were only about a handsbreadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.

“That’s it,” she said. “Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.”

“What is there to talk about?”

She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember—it’s a good few years younger, for one thing—but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair.

Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.

Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.

“Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.”

“I am happy.” She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated.

It’s a tiny spark of the woman I used to know. “I mean, wouldn’t you be? Sentence commuted for cash equivalence. And the money’s still flooding in, there’ll be biocoding work for the next decade. Until the ocean settles down again, we’ve got whole new levels of flow to domesticate, and that’s just locally. Someone’s still got to model the impact where the Mikuni current hits the warm water coming up from Kossuth, and then do something about it. We’ll be tendering as soon as the government funding clears. Josef says the rate we’re going, I’ll have paid off the whole sentence in another ten years.”

“Josef?”

“Oh, yeah, I should have said.” The smile comes out again, wider this time.

More open. “He’s really great, Tak. You should meet him. He’s running the project up there, he’s one of the reasons I got out in the first wave. He was doing the virtual hearings, he was my project liaison when I got out and then we just, ah, you know.”

She looked down at her lap, still smiling.

“You’re blushing, Sarah.”

“I am not.”

“Yeah, you are.” I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. “So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?”

She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. We’re both playing for keeps, Tak.

“He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.”

So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?

“That’s great,” I say.

“And what about you?” she asks with arch concern. “Are you happy?”

I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.

“Well, happy.” I pull another face. “That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?”

“For a while.”

“And what about now?”

I gesture vaguely. “Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.”

“Is it legal?”

“Are you kidding?”

Her face falls. “You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the re-sleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with …”

She shakes her head.

“Criminals?” I ask.

“Don’t laugh at me, Tak.”

I sigh. “I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.” She smiled again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it was edged with pain.

“People can change,” she says. “You should try it.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Maybe I will.”

And another.

“Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—”

“Wo, come on.” I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the table top with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes.

“Have you no self respect, woman? Stay for one more.”

So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.

And I never see her again.

“Sachilowska?” Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. “Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai street.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again what, to spite her?”

Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.

“It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d got out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.”

“So were you.”

“Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.”

“Okay,” Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. “So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.”

Behind the sound of the waves, I heard Japaridze again.

There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.

“Yeah, that’s right. It happens all the time.” I turned back to face her across the filtered cool of the screen-shaded table. “But I didn’t lose her in the differential, Virginia. I let her go. I let her go with that piece of shit, Josef, and I just walked away.”

Understanding dawned across her face. “Oh, okay. So that’s how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction IV. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.”

“It wasn’t just that,” I lied.

“Alright.” Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway.

“So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?”

“North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?”

“They converted?”

“He fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.”

“Really? Was she that much of a victim?”

“Virginia, she was fucking indentured!” I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable.

Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. “Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New anti-engineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing but the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.”

“She could have left.”

“They had a fucking child, alright?” Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. “They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.”

Vidaura nodded. “And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.”

“Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.”

“So what happened? She upset some venerable male?”

“No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable.” The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. “Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.”

The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earthbound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, prehuman, interstellar civilisation cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels; God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Re-sleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.

I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. “She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the centre of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.”

I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicoloured idiot tide it was.

“Afterwards, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometres out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.”

“That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.”

“Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.”

I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.

“So you’ve been there,” she murmured.

I nodded. “Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, snivelling by her grave. I got the story out of him.” My face twitched with the memory. “Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.”

“And then?”

“And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.”

She shook her head slightly. “The rest of who?”

“The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.” I looked at my hands. “And a few others who got in my way.”

She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.

“Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.”

“You’ve got Envoy recall,” she said numbly.

I gestured again. “Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—”

“You took their stacks?”

“Josef and the priests’, yes.”

“You destroyed them?”

“Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.” I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now.

And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. “Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.” I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. “I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.”

Vidaura looked down into her lap. “Is that what you tell yourself?”

“No, it’s just a theory.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there’s a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they’ve gone to hell. Either way suits me.”

“How are you financing this?” she whispered.

I found a bared-teeth grin from somewhere and put it on. “Well, contrary to popular belief, some parts of what happened on Sanction IV worked out quite well for me. I’m not short of funds.”

She looked up, face tightening towards anger. “You made money out of Sanction IV?”

“Nothing I didn’t earn,” I said quietly.

Her features smoothed somewhat as she backed the anger up. But her voice still came out taut. “And are these funds going to be enough?”

“Enough for what?”

“Well,” she frowned. “To finish this vendetta. You’re hunting down the priests from the village but—”

“No, I did that last year. It didn’t take me very long, there weren’t that many. Currently, I’m hunting down the ones who were serving members of the Ecclesiastical Mastery when she was murdered. The ones who wrote the rules that killed her. That’s taking me longer, there are a lot of them, and they’re more senior. Better protected.”

“But you’re not planning to stop with them?”

I shook my head. “I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

I don’t know how much Virginia told the others once we got back inside the cranked up virtuality. I stayed down in the mapping construct while the rest of them adjourned to the hotel-suite section, which somehow I couldn’t help thinking of as upstairs. I don’t know what she told them, and I didn’t much care. Mostly, it was a relief just to have let someone else in on the whole story.

Not to be the only one.

People like Isa and Plex knew fragments, of course, and Radul Segesvar somewhat more. But for the rest, the New Revelation had hidden what I was doing to them from the start. They didn’t want the bad publicity or the interference of infidel powers like the First Families. The deaths were passed off as accidents, monastery burglaries gone wrong, unfortunate petty muggings. Meanwhile, the word from Isa was that there were private contracts out on me at the Mastery’s behest. The priesthood had a militant wing, but they obviously didn’t place too much faith in it because they’d also seen fit to engage a handful of Millsport sneak assassins. One night in a small town on the Saffron Archipelago, I let one of them get close enough to test the calibre of the hired help. It wasn’t impressive.

I don’t know how much Virginia Vidaura told her surfer colleagues, but the presence of the priest in Kem Point alone made it very clear that we could not return from a raid on Rila Crags and stay on the Strip. If the New Revelation could track me this far, so could others far more competent.

As a sanctuary, Vchira Beach was blown.

Mario Ado voiced what was probably a general feeling.

“You’ve fucked this up, dragging your personal crabshit into the harbour with you. You find us a solution.”

So I did.

Envoy competence, one out of the manual—work with the tools to hand. I cast about in the immediate environment, summoned what I had that could be influenced and saw it immediately. Personal shit had done the damage, personal shit would haul us out of the swamp, not to mention solve some more of my own more personal problems by way of a side effect. The irony of it grinned back at me.

Not everyone was so amused. Ado for one.

“Trust the fucking haiduci!” There was a well-bred Millsport sneer behind the words. “No thank you.”

Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve used them before, Mari.”

“No, you’ve used them before. I steer well clear of scum like that. And anyway, this one you don’t even know.”

“I know of him. I’ve dealt with people who’ve dealt with him before, and from what I hear he’s a man of his word. But I can check him out. You say he owes you, Kovacs?”

“Very much so.”

She shrugged. “Then that should be enough.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sierra. You can’t—”

“Segesvar is solid,” I interrupted. “He takes his debts seriously in both directions. All it needs is the money. If you’ve got it.”

Koi glanced at Brasil, who nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “We can get it easily enough.”

“Oh, happy fucking birthday, Kovacs!”

Virginia Vidaura nailed Ado with a stare. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Mari. It isn’t your money. That’s safely on deposit in a Millsport merchant bank, isn’t it?”

“What’s that supposed to—”

“Enough,” said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day—real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialled the discreet coding on speaker phone with no visual.

It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amidst a lot of background noise, some of it real/virtual adjustment connection nutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.

“I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?”

“How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.”

The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.

“I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.”

I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.

“Check the account,” I told Segesvar. “The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.”

“You’re calling from a construct?”

“Go check your cashflow, Rad. I’ll hold.”

The rest was easy.

In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep and most programmes don’t bother to include the sub-routines that would cause it. Long term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely … odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that.

You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.

We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, running what-if scenarios and bickering. Every now and then one of us would vent an exasperated grunt, fall backwards into the knee deep water of the mapping construct and backstroke off out of the archipelago, towards the horizon. Provided you chose your angle of escape carefully and didn’t collide with an unremembered islet or scrape your back on a reef, it was an ideal way to get away and unwind. Floating out there with the voices of the others grown faint with distance, you could feel your consciousness loosen off again, like a cramped muscle relaxing.

At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included.

You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.

“There you are,” she said, with an odd lightness of tone.

“Here I am,” I agreed.

She cleared her throat. “How’s your head?”

“Cooling off.” I raised the sake cup in one hand. “Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.”

“You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.”

But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand and poured.

“Kampai,” she said.

“Por nosotros.”

We drank. She settled onto the automould opposite me. “Trying to make me feel homesick?”

“Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?”

“I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.”

“Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.”

“And the beach life.” She reclined a little on the automould and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and tanned from life on Vchira, and the spray-on swimsuit she was wearing showed it off full-length. I felt my pulse pick up slightly.

“Very beautiful,” I admitted. “Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.”

She seemed to realise the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.

“What else did he tell you?”

“Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.”

“You were looking for me.”

“Yeah.” Something stopped me at that simple admission. “I was.”

“And now that you’ve found me, what?”

My pulse had settled at an accelerated pounding. The edged whine of overstay in virtual was back. Images cascaded through my head. Virginia Vidaura, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, unattainable Envoy trainer, poised before us at induction, a dream of female competence beyond everyone’s reach. Splinters of mirth in voice and eyes that might have kindled to sensuality in a less clearly defined set of relationships. A cringingly clumsy attempt at flirtation from Jimmy de Soto once in the mess bar, slapped down with brutal disinterest. Authority wielded with an utter lack of sexual tension. My own lurid undischarged fantasies, slowly flattening under an immense respect that went in at the same bone deep level as the Envoy induction.

And then combat, the final dissipation of any romantic fumes that might have endured the training years. Vidaura’s face in a dozen different sleeves on a dozen different worlds, sharpened with pain or fury or just the intense focus of mission time. The stink of her too-long-unwashed body in a cramped shuttle on the dark side of Loyko’s moon, the slick feel of her blood on my hands one murderous night in Zihicce when she almost died.

The look on her face when the orders to crush all resistance in Neruda came through.

I’d thought those moments had taken us beyond sex. They seemed to scoop out emotional depths that made fucking seem shallow by comparison.

The last time I’d visited Vchira and seen the way Brasil leaned towards her—her Adoracion ancestry alone enough to strike sparks of desire off him—I’d felt a vague sort of superiority. Even with Yaroslav and the on-and-off long-term commitment they’d managed, I’d always believed that somehow he wasn’t getting to the core of the woman I had fought beside in more corners of the Protectorate than most people would ever see.

I adopted a quizzical look that felt like taking cover.

“You think this is a good idea?” I asked.

“No,” she said huskily. “Do you?”

“Umm. In all honesty, Virginia, I’m rapidly beginning not to care. But I’m not the one attached to Jack Soul Brasil.”

She laughed. “This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.”

I looked around the suite. “He could pop up any minute. So could any of them for that matter. I’m not much for display sex.”

“Me neither.” She got up and offered me her hand. “Come with me.”

She led me out of the suite and into the corridor. In both directions, identical doors mirrored each other across the anonymous grey carpeting and receded into a pale mist after a few dozen metres. We went, hand-in-hand, right up to the beginnings of the fade-out, feeling the faint cold that breathed out of it, and Vidaura opened the last door on the left. We slipped inside, hands already on each other.

It doesn’t take long to peel off spray-ons. Five seconds after the door closed, she had my surf shorts to my ankles and was rolling my rapidly hardening cock between her palms. I tugged free with an effort, got her swimsuit off her shoulders and skinned down to her waist, pressed the heel of one palm hard against the juncture of her thighs. Her breathing tautened and the muscles in her stomach flexed. I knelt and forced the suit down further, over her hips and thighs until she could step easily out of it.

Then I spread the lips of her cunt with my fingers, traced the opening lightly with my tongue and stood up to kiss her on the mouth. Another tremor ran through her. She sucked my tongue in and bit it gently, then put both hands to my head and pulled back. I dragged my fingertips up the creases of her cunt again, found damp and heat and pressed gently at her clitoris. She shivered and grinned at me.

“And now that you’ve found me,” she repeated, eyes starting to defocus.

“What?”

“Now,” I told her, “I want to find out if the muscles in those thighs are as strong as they look.”

Her eyes lit. The grin came back.

“I’ll bruise you,” she promised. “I’ll crack your spine.”

“You’ll try, you mean.”

She made a small, hungry noise and bit my lower lip. I hooked an arm under one of her knees and lifted. She grabbed at my shoulders and wrapped the other leg around my waist, then reached down for my cock and pressed it hard into the folds of her cunt. In the moments of conversation, she’d softened and moistened to readiness. With my free hand, I spread her wider open and she sank onto me, gasping at the penetration and rocking back and forth against me from the waist up. Her thighs clamped around my waist with the promised bruising force. I swung us about to get a wall at my back and leaned against it. Got a measure of control.

It was short lived. Vidaura hooked her grip deeper into my shoulders and began working herself back and forth on my erection, breath coming in short grunts of effort that went up in pitch and rapidity as her orgasm built. Not far behind her, I could feel the tension in my cock gathering heat all the way back to the root. I could feel the rub of her insides over my glans. I lost whatever control I’d had, grabbed at her arse with both hands and rammed her harder onto me. Above my face, her closed eyes flew momentarily open and she grinned down at me. The tip of her tongue came out and touched her upper teeth. I laughed back, tight and locked up. Now it was a struggle, Vidaura arching her belly forward and hips back, working the head of my prick back to the mouth of her cunt and the tightly gathered nerve endings there, my hands ramming her back again and trying to bury myself in her to the hilt.

The fight dissolved in sensory avalanche.

Sweat building on our skin, slippery under our gripping hands—

Hard grins and kisses that were more like bites—

Breathing tipped frantically out of control—

My face, buried against the scant swelling of her breasts and the sweat slick flat space between—

Her face rubbing sideways on the top of my head—

One agonising moment when she held herself off me with all her force—

A yell, maybe hers, maybe mine—

—and then the liquid gushing of release, and collapse, juddering and sliding down the wall in a heap of splayed limbs and spasming bodies.

Spent.

After a long moment, I propped myself up sideways, and my flaccid cock popped slickly out of her. She moved one leg and moaned faintly. I tried to shift us both into a slightly more tenable position. She opened one eye and grinned.

“So, soldier. Wanted to do that for long, have you?”

I grinned back, weakly. “Only forever. You?”

“The thought had crossed my mind once or twice, yeah.” She pushed against the wall with the soles of both feet and sat up, leaning on her elbows. Her gaze flickered down the length of her body and then across at mine. “But I don’t fuck the recruits. Jesus, look at the mess we made.”

I reached a hand across to her sweat-smeared belly, trailed a finger down into the cleft at the start of her cunt. She twitched and I smiled.

“Want a shower then?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, I think we’d better.”

We started to fuck again in the shower, but neither of us had the same manic strength that had imbued the first time and we couldn’t stay braced.

I carried her out to the bedroom and laid her down soaking wet on the bed instead. I knelt by her head, turned it gently and guided her mouth to my prick. She sucked, lightly at first then with gathering force. I lay backward alongside her slim muscled body, turned my own head and opened her thighs with my hands. Then I slid an arm around her hips, drew her cunt to my face and went to work with my tongue. And the hunger came out all over again, like rage. The pit of my belly felt as if it was filled with sparking wires. Down the bed, she made muffled noises, rolled her weight over and crouched above me on elbows and spread knees. Her hips and thighs crushed down on me, her mouth worked the head of my prick and her hand pumped at the shaft.

It took a long, slow, delirious time. Chemically unaided, we didn’t know each other well enough for a truly synchronised orgasm, but the Envoy conditioning or maybe something else covered for the lack. When finally I came into the back of her throat, the force of it bent me up off the bed against her crouched body and in pure reflex I wrapped both arms tight around her hips. I dragged her down onto me, tongue frantic, so that she spat me out still spasming and leaking, and screamed with her own climax, and collapsed onto me shuddering.

But not long after, she rolled off, sat up cross-legged and looked seriously at me, as if I was a problem she couldn’t solve.

“I think that’s probably enough,” she said. “We’d better get back.”

And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.

I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I re-entered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a co-ordination that spoke volumes.

“You’ll get your money back, you know,” I told him.

Brasil twitched impatiently. “I know that, Tak. I’m not concerned about the money. We would have cleared your debt with Segesvar as simple payment, if you’d asked. We still can—you could consider it a bounty for what you’ve brought us if you like.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said stiffly. “I’m considering it a loan. I’ll pay you back as soon as things have calmed down.”

A stifled snort from Sierra Tres. I turned on her.

“Something amusing you?”

“Yeah. The idea that things are going to calm down any time soon.”

We watched the creep of night, across the sea in front of us. At the darkened end of the horizon, Daikoku crept up to join Marikanon in the western sky. Further along the beach, the rest of Brasil’s crew were building a bonfire. Laughter cracked around the gathering pile of driftwood, and bodies clowned about in dim silhouette. In defiance of any misgivings either Tres or I might have, there was a deep calm soaking into the evening, as soft and cool as the sand underfoot. After the manic hours of the virtuality, there seemed nothing that really needed to be done or said until tomorrow. And right now tomorrow was still rolling round the other side of the planet, like a wave out deep and building force. I thought that if I were Koi, I’d believe I could feel the march of history holding its breath.

“So I take it no one’s going to get an early night,” I said, nodding at the preparations for the bonfire.

“We could all be Really Dead in a couple of days.” Tres said. “Get plenty of sleep then.”

Abruptly, she tugged her T-shirt cross-armed up over her head. Her breasts lifted and then swung disconcertingly as she completed the movement.

Not what I needed right now. She dumped the T-shirt in the sand and started down the beach.

“I’m going for a swim,” she called back to us. “Anyone coming?”

I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.

I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen metres out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred metres from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s reef.

I angled right and set off along the beach towards the site of the bonfire.

People nodded at me, some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.

“Strong stuff,” I wheezed and handed it back.

“Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.” He gestured muzzily. “Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.”

Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand amongst them.

Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.

“Just want to say,” she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic. “Thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.”

Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity.

“That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.”

Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.

“Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,” said Hiro.

I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.

“What’s she like?” asked Andrea.

“Uh.” An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. “She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.”

Andrea nodded, smiling happily. “You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.”

“You’ll get your chance, And.” Daniel said, slurring a little. “Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.”

A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.

Hiro nodded grimly. “Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.”

“It’ll be so good,” said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. “To have someone again who knows what to do.”