Woken Furies

TWENTY-EIGHT

North-eastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Mills port Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, aeons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometres across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fuelled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast to other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation.

Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plantlife.

Later still, humans came and did the same.

At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendour. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometres in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.

“I hate the fucking place,” Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffee house called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. “Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.”

It was a standard rant—one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

“You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“So?” She swung a glare on me. “Does that mean I’ve got to like it?”

“No, I guess not.”

We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbour quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafes. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death—others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets further down seemed to have been sanitised—there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbour was full of yachts.

In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun and inside the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workmanlike little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system. Millsport Sessions, Dream of Weed.

At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d greysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect and her eyes were dusted with some haemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

I smiled as I sat down. “We’re fashionably late, Isa. This is Mari. Mari, Isa. So how are we doing?”

Isa took a long, insolent moment to check out Mari, then turned her head and unjacked with an elegant, much practised gesture that showed off the nape of her neck.

“We’re doing well. And we’re doing it silently. Nothing new on the Millsport PD net, and nothing from any of the private security outfits the First Families like to use. They don’t know you’re here.”

I nodded. Gratifying though the news was, it made sense. We’d hit Millsport across the earlier part of the week, split into half a dozen separate groups, arrivals co-ordinated days apart. Fake ID at Little Blue Bug standards of impenetrability and a variety of different transport options ranging from cheap speed-freighters to a Saffron Line luxury cruiser. With people streaming into Millsport from all over the planet for the Harlan’s Day festivities, it would have been either very bad luck or very bad operational management if any of us had been picked up.

But it was still good to know.

“What about security up at the Crags?”

Isa shook her head. “Less noise out of there than a priest’s wife coming. If they knew what you had planned, there’d be a whole new protocol layer and there isn’t.”

“Or you haven’t spotted it,” said Mari.

Isa fixed her with another cool stare. “My dear, do you know anything at all about dataflow?”

“I know what levels of encryption we’re dealing with.”

“Yes, so do I. Tell me, how do you think I pay for my studies?”

Mari Ado examined her nails. “With petty crime, I assume.”

“Charming.” Isa shuttled her gaze in my direction. “Where did you get her, Tak? Madame Mi’s?”

“Behave, Isa.”

She gusted a long-suffering teenage sigh. “Alright, Tak. For you. For you, I won’t rip this mouthy bitch’s hair out. And Mari, for your information, I am gainfully employed nights, under a pseudident, as a freelance security software scribe for more corporate names than you’ve probably given back-street blowjobs.”

She waited, tensed. Ado looked back at her with glittery eyes for a moment, then smiled and leaned forward slightly. Her voice rose no higher than a corrosive murmur.

“Listen, you stupid little virgin, if you think you’re going to get a cat fight out of me, you’re badly mistaken. And lucky too. In the unlikely event that you could push my buttons sufficient to piss me off that far, you wouldn’t even see me coming. Now why don’t we discuss the business at hand, and then you can go back to playing at datacrime with your study partners and pretending you know something about the world.”

“You fucking whor—”

“Isa!” I put a snap into my voice and a hand in front of her as she started to rise. “That’s enough. She’s right, she could kill you with her bare hands and not even break a sweat. Now behave, or I’m not going to pay you.”

Isa shot me a look of betrayal and sat back down. Under the harlequin face paint, it was hard to tell, but I thought she was flushing furiously.

Maybe the crack about virginity had touched a nerve. Mari Ado had the good grace not to look pleased.

“I didn’t have to help you,” Isa said in a small voice. “I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.”

“We won’t,” I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. “Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?”

What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matt-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week.

Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool.

Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.

But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?

I certainly didn’t at her age.

If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—

Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.

Isa covered it well enough to deserve applause. Whatever misgivings she had, by the time we’d finished the handover, her ruffled feathers had smoothed and she had her laconic Millsport drawl back in place.

“Did you find Natsume?” I asked her.

“Yeah, as it happens I did. But I’m not convinced you’ll want to talk to him.”

“Why not?”

She grinned. “Because he got religion, Kovacs. Lives in a monastery now, over on Whaleback and Ninth.”

“Whaleback? That the Renouncer place?”

“Sure is.” She struck an absurdly solemn, prayerful pose that didn’t match her hair and face. “Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware. Renounce henceforth all flesh, and the world.”

I felt my mouth twitch. Beside me, Mari Ado sat humourless as a ripwing.

“I got no problem with those guys, Isa. They’re harmless. Way I see it, they’re stupid enough to shun female company, that’s their loss. But I’m surprised someone like Natsume’d buy into something like that.”

“Ah, but you’ve been away. They take women too, these days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, started way back, nearly a decade ago. What I heard, they found a couple of covert females in their midst. Been there for years. Figures, right? Anyone who’s re-sleeved could lie about their sex.” Isa’s voice picked up a beat as she hit her home turf running. “No one outside of government’s got the money to run datachecks on stuff like that. If you’ve lived in a male sleeve for long enough, even psychosurgery has a hard time telling the difference. So anyway, back at the Brotherhood, it was either go the NewRev single-sleeve-and-you’re-out route, or come over all modern and desegregate. Lo and behold, the word from on high spake suddenly of change.”

“Don’t suppose they changed the name too, did they?”

“Don’t suppose they did. Still the Brotherhood. Brother embraces sister, apparently.” A teenage shrug. “Not sure how the sisters feel about all that embracing, but that’s entry-level dues for you.”

“Speaking of which,” said Mari Ado. “Are we permitted entry?”

“Yeah, they take visitors. You may have to wait for Natsume, but not so’s you’d notice. That’s the great thing about Renouncing the flesh, isn’t it.”

Isa grinned again. “No inconvenient things like Time and Space to worry about.”

“Good work, Issy.”

She blew me a kiss.

But as we were getting up to leave, she frowned slightly and evidently came to a decision. She raised a hand and cupped her fingers to get us back closer.

“Listen, guys. I don’t know exactly what you’re after up at Rila, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this for nothing. Old Harlan won’t be coming out of the pod this time around.”

“No?” On his birthday, that was unusual.

“That’s right. Bit of semi-covert court gossip I dipped yesterday. They lost another heirling down at Amami Sands. Hacked to death with a baling tine, apparently. They’re not making it public, but the MPD are a bit sloppy with their encryption these days. I was cruising for Harlan-related stuff so, like that. Picked it out of the flow. Anyway, with that and old Seichi getting toasted in his skimmer last week, they’re not taking any chances. They’ve called off half the family appearances altogether, and looks like even Mitzi Harlan’s getting a doubled Secret Service detachment. And Old Man Harlan stays unsleeved. That’s for definite. Think they’re planning to let him watch the celebrations through a virtual linkup.”

I nodded slowly. “Thanks. That’s good to know.”

“Yeah, sorry if it’s going to fuck up some spectacular assassination attempt for you. You didn’t ask, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’d hate for you to go all that way up there and find nothing to kill.”

Ado smiled thinly.

“That’s not what we’re here for,” I said quickly. “But thanks anyway. Listen Isa, you don’t remember a couple of weeks back, some other Harlan small-fry got himself killed in the wharf district?”

“Yep. Marek Harlan-Tsuchiya. Methed out of his head, fell off Karlovy Dock, banged his head and drowned. Heartbreaking.”

Ado made an impatient gesture. I held up a hand to forestall her.

“Any chance our boy Marek was helped over the edge, do you think?”

Isa pulled a face. “Could be, I guess. Karlovy’s not the safest of places after dark. But they’ll have re-sleeved him by now, and there’s been nothing in the air about it being a murder. Then again—”

“Why should they let the general public in on it. Right.” I could feel the Envoy intuition twitching, but it was too faint to make anything of. “Okay, Isa. Thanks for the newsflash. It doesn’t affect anything at our end, but keep your ears tuned anyway, huh?”

“Always do, sam.”

We paid the tab and left her there, red-veined eyes and harlequin mask and the coil of light weaving at her elbow like some domesticated demon familiar. She waved as I looked back, and I felt a brief stab of affection for her that lasted me all the way out into the street.

“Stupid little bitch,” said Mari Ado as we headed down towards the waterfront. “I hate that fucking fake underclass thing.”

I shrugged. “Well, rebellion takes a lot of different forms.”

“Yeah, and that back there was none of them.”

We took a real-keel ferry across the Reach to the platform suburb they’re calling East Akan, apparently in the hope that people who can’t afford the slopes of the Akan district itself will settle there instead. Ado went off to find some tea, and I stayed by the rail, watching the water traffic and the changing perspectives as the ferry sailed. There’s a magic to Millsport that’s easy to forget while you’re away, but get out on the waters of the Reach and the city seems to open to you. Wind in your face and the belaweed tang of the sea combine to scrub away the urban grimness, and you discover in its place a broad, seafarer’s optimism that can sometimes stay with you for hours after you step back on land.

Trying not to let it go to my head, I squinted south to the horizon.

There, shrouded to fading in seamist thrown up by the maelstrom, Rila Crags brooded in stacked isolation. Not quite the furthest southerly outcrop of the archipelago, but near enough, twenty klicks of open water back north to the nearest other settled piece of land—the tail end of New Kanagawa—and at least half that to the nearest piece of rock you could even stand on. Most of the First Families had staked out high ground in Millsport early on, but Harlan had trumped them all. Rila, beautiful in glistening black volcanic stone, was a fortress in all but name. An elegant and powerful reminder to the whole city of who was in charge here. An eyrie to supplant those built by our Martian predecessors.

We docked at East Akan with a soft bump that was like waking up. I found Mari Ado again, down by the debarkation ramp, and we threaded our way through the rectilinear streets as rapidly as was conducive to checking we weren’t being followed. Ten minutes later, Virginia Vidaura was letting us into the as yet unfitted loft apartment space that Brasil had chosen as our base of operations. Her eyes passed across us like a clinical wipe.

“Go okay?”

“Yeah. Man here didn’t make any new friends, but what can you do?”

Ado grunted and shouldered past me, then disappeared off into the interior of the warehouse. Vidaura closed the door and secured it while I told her about Natsume.

“Jack’ll be disappointed,” she said.

“Yeah, not what I expected either. So much for legends, eh? You want to come across to Whaleback with me?” I raised my eyebrows clownishly.

“Virtual environment.”

“I think that’s probably not a good idea.”

I sighed. “No, probably not.”

TWENTY-NINE

The monastery on Whaleback and Ninth was a grim, blank-faced place.

Whaleback islet, along with about a dozen other similar fragments of land and reclaimed reef, served as a commuting-distance settlement for workers in the docks and marine industries of New Kanagawa. Causeways and suspension spans provided ready access across the short expanse of water to Kanagawa itself, but the limited space on these satellite isles meant cramped, barracks-style apartments for the workforce. The Renouncers had simply acquired a hundred-metre frontage and nailed all the windows shut.

“For security,” the monk who let us in explained. “We run a skeleton crew here and there’s a lot of valuable equipment. You’ll have to hand over those weapons before we go any further.”

Beneath the simple grey coveralls of the order, he was sleeved in a basic, low-end Fabrikon synth that presumably ran built-in scanning gear.

The voice was like a bad phone connection amplified and the silicoflesh face was set in a detached expression which may or may not have reflected how he felt about us—small muscle groups are never that great on the cheaper models. On the other hand, even cheap synths usually run machine levels of reflex and strength, and you could probably burn a blaster hole right through this one without doing much more than piss its wearer off.

“Seems fair,” I told him.

I dug out the GS Rapsodia and handed it over butt-first. Beside me, Sierra Tres did the same with a blunt-looking blaster. Brasil spread his arms agreeably and the synth nodded.

“Good. I’ll return these when you leave.”

He led us through a gloomy evercrete entry hall whose obligatory statue of Konrad Harlan had been unflatteringly masked in plastic, then into what must once have been a ground-floor apartment. Two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs, as basic as the attendant’s sleeve, were gathered facing a desk and a heavy steel door beyond. A second attendant was waiting for us behind the desk. Like her colleague, she was synth sleeved and coveralled in grey, but her facial features seemed fractionally more animated. Maybe she was trying harder, working at full acceptance under the new unisex induction decrees.

“How many of you are requesting audience?” she asked, pleasantly enough given the limitations of her Fabrikon voice.

Jack Soul Brasil and I raised our hands, Sierra Tres stood pointedly to one side. The female attendant gestured to us to follow her and punched out a code on the steel door. It opened with an antique metallic grinding and we stepped into a grey-walled chamber fitted with a half dozen sagging couches and a virtual transfer system that looked like it might still run on silicon.

“Please make yourselves comfortable in one of the couches and attach electrodes and hypnophones as in the instruction holo you will see at your right side.”

Make yourselves comfortable was an ambitious request—the couches were not automould and didn’t seem to have been made with comfort in mind. I was still trying to find a good posture when the attendant stepped across to the transfer control suite and powered us up. A sonocode murmured through the hypnophones.

“Please turn your head to the right and watch the holoform until you lose consciousness.”

Transition, oddly enough, was a lot smoother than I’d expected from the surroundings. At the heart of the holosphere, an oscillating figure eight formed and began cycling through the colour spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the lightshow expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping towards the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shrivelled to white and the blending roar of the stream in my ears. There was a tilting of everything under me, a sense of the whole world being turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and suddenly I was deposited upright on a worn stone platform behind a waterfall in full flood. The remains of the oscillating spectrum showed up briefly as an edge of refracted light in faint mist, then faded like a dying note. Abruptly there were puddles around my feet, and cold, damp air on my face.

As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil.

The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again.

The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.

“It’s this way, I think.” I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.

We followed the steps round a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.

It rose among gentry rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.

“Well you can see why they went virtual,” I said, mostly to myself. “It beats Whaleback and Ninth.”

Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have got over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.

We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.

“May I help you?” he asked gently.

Brasil nodded. “We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.”

“Natsume.” The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again.

“He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.”

The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.

“Nik?” Brasil moved forward to meet him. “Is that you?”

“Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.” Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw.

“Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.”

He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I reassured him.

“Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.”

Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.

“Jack Soul Brasil?”

“Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?”

A brief smile. “Learning.”

“What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.”

“Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?”

Brasil shifted awkwardly. “Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—”

“Oh, time here is.” The smile again. “Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.”

We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation, and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him any more.

Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amidst the cobwebby grey scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimetres high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view, I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside of fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.

“Very nice,” said Brasil.

I nodded. “Yes. You must be very pleased with those.”

“Only moderately.” Natsume circled his shred-petalled charges with a critical eye. “In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.”

He looked expectantly up at us.

I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there..

“Are they a bit short?” I asked finally.

Natsume shook his head and chuckled. “No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And—I’m so sorry—I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanour. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.”

He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself.

He gestured out at the plants.

“They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matt. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.”

“Nik …”

He looked at Brasil. “Yes.”

“Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.”

I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.

“Some stuff?” Natsume nodded. “What stuff would that be, then?”

“We.” I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. “I need your help, Nik.”

“Yes, clearly. But in what?”

“It’s.”

Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.

“Jack,” he said. “This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?”

Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.

“You’ve changed, Nik.”

“Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?” For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. “That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.”

“That’s not—”

“Of course I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?”

Brasil came down a step towards him, abruptly. “Oh, you think this is better?”

He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.

“You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow flowers instead of living, and you’re going to accuse me of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.”

“What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?”

“I was standing on a ten-metre wall four days ago.” Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. “That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.”

“Is it?” Natsume shrugged. “If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?”

“That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—”

“I don’t hate—”

“Out there, actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.”

“Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.”

“My point?” Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly. “None of this is fucking real, Nik.”

I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them, quite literally hovering.

His feet were a clear thirty centimetres off the uneven paving.

“Norikae-san?” asked the other.

I shifted stance minutely, wondering idly if they were real inhabitants of the monastery or not, and if not what operating parameters they might have in circumstances like these. If the Renouncers ran internal security systems, our chances in a fight were zero. You don’t wander into someone else’s virtuality and brawl successfully unless they want you to.

“It’s nothing, Katana-san.” Natsume made a hurried and complicated motion with both hands. “A difference of perspective between friends.”

“My apologies, then, for the intrusion.” Katana bowed over fists gathered one into the other and the two newcomers withdrew into the arched tunnel. I didn’t see whether they walked away in real time or not.

“Perhaps,” began Natsume quietly, then stopped.

“I’m sorry, Nik.”

“No, you are right of course. None of this is real in the way we both used to understand it. But in here, I am more real than I ever was before. I define how I exist, and there is no harder challenge than that, believe me.”

Brasil said something inaudible. Natsume resumed his seat on the wooden steps. He looked back at Brasil, and after a moment the surfer seated himself a couple of steps higher up. Natsume nodded and stared at his garden.

“There is a beach to the east,” he said absently. “Mountains to the south. If I wish, they can be made to meet. I can climb any time I wish, swim any time I wish. Even surf, though I haven’t so far.

“And in all of these things, I have choices to make. Choices of consequence. Bottlebacks in the ocean or not? Coral to scrape myself on and bleed, or not? Blood to bleed with, come to that? These are all matters requiring prior meditation. Full-effect gravity in the mountains? If I fall, will I allow it to kill me? And what will I allow that to mean?” He looked at his hands as if they too were a choice of some sort. “If I break or tear something, will I allow it to hurt? If so, for how long? How long will I wait to heal? Will I allow myself to remember the pain properly afterwards? And then, from these questions, the secondary—some would say the primary—issues raise their heads from the swamp. Why am I really doing this? Do I want the pain? Why would that be? Do I want to fall? Why would that be? Does it matter to me to reach the top or simply to suffer on the way up? Who am I doing these things for? Who was I ever doing them for? Myself? My father? Lara, perhaps?”

He smiled out at the filigree poppies. “What do you think, Jack? Is it because of Lara?”

“That wasn’t your fault, Nik.”

The smile went away. “In here, I study the only thing that scares me any more. Myself. And in that process, I harm no one else.”

“And help no one else,” I pointed out.

“Yes. Axiomatic.” He looked round at me. ”Are you a revolutionary too, then? One of the neoQuellist faithful?”

“Not as such.”

“But you have little sympathy with Renouncing?”

I shrugged. “It’s harmless. As you say. And no one has to play who doesn’t want to. But you kind of assume the rest of us are going to provide the powered infrastructure for your way of life. Seems to me that’s a basic failure in Renouncing, all on its own.”

I got the smile back for that. “Yes, that is something of a test of faith for many of us. Of course, ultimately we believe all of humanity will follow us into virtual. We are merely preparing the way. Learning the path, you might say.”

“Yeah,” snapped Brasil. “And meanwhile, outside the world falls apart on the rest of us.”

“It was always falling apart, Jack. Do you really think what I used to do out there, the little thefts and defiances, do you really think all that made any difference?”

“We’re taking a team into Rila,” said Brasil abruptly, decided. “That’s the difference we’re going to make, Nik. Right there.”

I cleared my throat. “With your help.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, we need the route, Nik.” Brasil got up and wandered off into a corner of the quadrangle, raising his voice as if, now the secret was out, he wanted even the volume of conversation to reflect his decision. “You feel like giving it to us? Say, for old times’ sake?”

Natsume got up and regarded me quizzically.

“Have you climbed a sea cliff before?”

“Not really. But the sleeve I’m wearing knows how to do it.”

For a moment he held my eye. It was as if he was processing what I’d just said and it wouldn’t load. Then, suddenly, he barked a laugh that didn’t belong inside the man we’d been talking to.

“Your sleeve knows how?” The laughter shook out to a more governed chuckling and then a hard-eyed gravity. “You’ll need more than that. You do know there are ripwing colonies on the top third of Rila Crags? Probably more now than there ever were when I went up. You do know there’s an overhanging flange that runs all the way round the lower battlements, and the Buddha alone knows how much updated anti-intrusion tech they’ve built into it since I climbed it. You do know the currents at the base of Rila will carry your broken body halfway up the Reach before they drop you anywhere.”

“Well,” I shrugged. “At least if I fall, I won’t get picked up for interrogation.”

Natsume glanced across at Brasil.

“How old is he?”

“Leave him alone, Nik. He’s wearing Eishundo custom, which he found, he tells me, whilst wandering around New Hokkaido killing mimints for a living. You do know what a mimint is, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Natsume was still looking at me. “We’ve heard the news about Mecsek in here.”

“It’s not exactly news these days, Nik.” Brasil told him, with evident glee.

“You’re really wearing Eishundo?”

I nodded.

“You know what that’s worth?”

“I’ve had it demonstrated to me a couple of times, yeah.”

Brasil shifted impatiently on the stonework of the quadrangle. “Look, Nik, are you going to give us this route or not? Or are you just worried we’re going to beat your record?”

“You’re going to get yourselves killed, stacks irretrievable, both of you. Why should I help you to do that?”

“Hey, Nik—you’ve renounced the world and the flesh, remember. Why should how we end up in the real world bother you in here?”

“It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.”

Brasil grinned, maybe at the obscenity he’d finally managed to elicit from his former hero. “Yeah, but at least we’re still in the game. And you know we’re going to do this anyway, with or without your help. So—”

“Alright.” Natsume held up his hands. “Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be real enough for you.”

Brasil just shrugged and grinned again.

“What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?”

Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail—the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.

“But the bad news cuts both ways,” he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. “That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.”

I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know—that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.

“Over in New Kanagawa,” I said instead, “I heard they’re wiring ripwings with microcam systems. Training them too. Any truth in that?”

He snorted.

“Yeah, they were saying the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago. It was paranoid crabshit then, and I guess it still is now. What’s the point of a microcam in a ripwing? They never go near human habitation if they can avoid it. And from what I recall of the studies done, they don’t domesticate or train easily. Plus more than likely the orbitals would spot the wiring and shoot them down on the wing.” He gave me an unpleasant grin, not one from the Renouncer monk serenity suite. “Believe me, you’ve got quite enough to worry about climbing through a colony of wild ripwings, never mind some sort of domesticated cyborg variety.”

“Right. Thanks. Any other helpful tips?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Don’t fall off.”

But there was a look in his eyes that belied the laconic detachment he affected and later, as he uploaded the data for outside collection, he was quiet in a tightened way that had none of his previous monkish calm to it.

When he led us back down through the monastery, he didn’t speak at all.

Brasil’s visit had ruffled him like spring breezes coming in across the carp lakes in Danchi. Now, beneath the rippled surface, powerful forms flexed restlessly back and forth. When we reached the entrance hall, he turned to Brasil and started speaking, awkwardly.

“Listen, if you—”

Something screamed.

The Renouncer’s construct rendering was good—I felt the minute prickle across my palms as the Eishundo sleeve’s gekko reflexes got ready to grab rock and climb. Out of peripheral vision suddenly amped up, I saw Brasil tense—and behind him I saw the wall shudder.

“Move!” I yelled.

At first, it seemed to be a product of the doorkeeper tapestries, a bulging extrusion from the same fabric. Then I saw it was the stonework behind the cloth that was bulging inward, warped under forces the real world would not have permitted. The screaming might have been some construct analogue of the colossal strain the structure was under, or it might simply have been the voice of the thing that was trying to get in. There wasn’t time to know. Split seconds later the wall erupted inward with a sound like a huge melon cracking, the tapestry tore down the centre and an impossible ten-metre-tall figure stepped down into the hall.

It was as if a Renouncer monk had been pumped so full of high-grade lubricant that his body had ruptured at every joint to let the oil out. A grey-coveralled human form was vaguely recognisable at the centre of the mess, but all around it iridescent black liquid boiled out and hung on the air in viscous, reaching tendrils. The face of the thing was gone, eyes and nose and mouth ripped apart by the pressure of the extruding oil. The stuff that had done the damage pulsed out of every orifice and juncture of limb as if the heart within was still beating. The screaming emanated from the whole figure in time with each pulse, never quite dying away before the next blast of sound.

I found I’d dropped to a combat crouch that I knew was going to be worse than useless. All we could do now was run.

“Norikae-san, Norikae-san. Please leave the area now.”

It was a chorus of cries, perfectly cadenced, as from the opposite wall a phalanx of doorkeepers threaded themselves out of the tapestries and arced gracefully over our heads towards the intruder, wielding curious, spiked clubs and lances. Their freshly assembled bodies were laced with an extrusion of their own that glowed with soft, cross-hatched golden light.

“Please lead your guests to the exit immediately. We will deal with this.”

The structured gold threads touched the ruptured figure, and it recoiled. The screaming splintered and mounted in volume and pitch, stabbing at my eardrums. Natsume turned to us, shouting above the noise.

“You heard them. There’s nothing you can do about this. Get out of here.”

“Yeah, how do we do that?” I shouted back.

“Go back to—” His words faded out as if he’d been turned down. Over his head, something punched a massive hole in the roof of the hall. Blocks of stone rained down, and the doorkeepers flinched about in the air, lashing out with golden light that disintegrated the debris before it could hit us. It cost two of them their existence as the black threaded intruder capitalised on their distraction, reached out with thick new tentacles, and tore them apart. I saw them bleed pale light as they died. Through the roof—

“Oh, fuck.”

It was another oil-exploded figure, this one double the size of the previous arrival, reaching in with human arms that had sprouted huge liquid talons from out of the knuckles and under the nails of each hand. A ruptured head squeezed through and grinned blankly down at us. Globules of the black stuff cascaded down like drool from the thing’s torn mouth, splattering the floor and corroding it through to a fine silver filigree underlay. A droplet caught my cheek and scorched the skin. The splintered shrieking intensified.

“This is the destiny of the human race, to Upload. We are at our strongest there, we will triumph there.”

I gave up. I shouted back at him.

“Fine. Great. You let me know how that turns out. Jack, Sierra. Let’s leave these idiots to kill themselves and get the fuck out of here.”

We abandoned the two of them in the transfer room. The last I saw of either was the male attendant laying himself on one of the couches, staring straight up while the woman attached the trodes. His face was shiny with sweat, but it was rapt too, locked in a paroxysm of will and emotion.

Out on Whaleback and Ninth, soft afternoon light was painting the blank eyed walls of the monastery warm and orange, and the sounds of traffic hooting in the Reach drifted up with the smell of the sea. A light westerly breeze stirred dust and dried-out spindrizzle spores in the gutters. Up ahead, a couple of children ran across the street, making shooting noises and chasing a miniature robot toy made to resemble a karakuri. There was no one else about, and nothing in the scene to suggest the battle now raging back in the machine heart of the Renouncers’ construct. You could have been forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a dream.

But down at the lower limits of my neurachem hearing as we walked away, I could just make out the cry of ancient sirens, like a warning, feeble and faint, of the stirring forces and the chaos to come.

THIRTY

Harlan’s Day.

More correctly, Harlan’s Eve—technically, the festivities wouldn’t commence until midnight rolled around, and that was a solid four hours away. But even this early in the evening, with the last of the day’s light still high in the western sky, the proceedings had kicked off long since. Over in New Kanagawa and Danchi the downtown areas would already be a lurid parade of holodisplay and masked dance, and the bars would all be serving at state-subsidised birthday prices. Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the

First Families were accomplished masters. Even those who hated them most would have had to admit that you couldn’t fault Harlan and his kind when it came to throwing a street party.

Down by the water in Tadaimako, the mood was more genteel but festive still. Work had ceased in the commercial harbour around lunchtime, and now small groups of dock workers sat on the high sides of real keel freighters, sharing pipes and bottles and looking expectantly at the sky. In the marina, small parties were in progress on most of the yachts, one or two larger ones spilling out from vessels onto the jetties. A confused mish-mash of music splashed out everywhere, and as the evening light thickened you could see where decks and masts had been sprayed with illuminum powder in green and pink. Excess powder glimmered scummily in the water between hulls.

A couple of yachts across from the trimaran we were stealing, a minimally-clad blonde woman waved giddily at me. I lifted the Erkezes cigar, also stolen, in cautious salute, hoping she wouldn’t take it as an invitation to jump ship and come over. Isa had music she swore was fashionable thumping up from below decks, but it was a cover. The only thing going on to that beat was an intrusion run into the guts of the trimaran Boubin Islander’s onboard security systems. Uninvited guests trying to crash this particular party were going to meet Sierra Tres or Jack Soul Brasil and the business end of a Kalashnikov shard gun at the base of the companionway.

I knocked some ash off the cigar and wandered about in the yacht’s stern seating area, trying to look as if I belonged there. Vague tension eeled through my guts, more insistent than I’d usually expect before a gig. It didn’t take much imagination to work out why. An ache that I knew was psychosomatic twinged down the length of my left arm.

I very badly didn’t want to climb Rila Crags.

Fucking typical. The whole city’s partying, and I get to spend the night clinging to a two-hundred-metre sheer cliff face.

“Hello there.”

I glanced up and saw the minimally-clad blonde woman standing at the gangplank and smiling brilliantly. She wobbled a little on exaggerated stiletto heels.

“Hello,” I said cautiously.

“Don’t know your face,” she said with inebriated directness. “I’d remember a hull this gorgeous. You don’t usually moor here, do you?”

“No, that’s right.” I slapped the rail. “First time she’s been to Millsport. Only got in a couple of days ago.”

For the Boubin Islander and her real owners at least, it was the truth.

They were a pair of moneyed couples from the Ohrid Isles, rich by way of some state sell-off in local navigational systems, visiting Millsport for the first time in decades. An ideal choice, plucked out of the harbourmaster datastack by Isa along with everything else we needed to get aboard the thirty-metre trimaran. Both couples were unconscious in a Tadaimako hotel right now, and a couple of Brasil’s younger revolutionary enthusiasts would make sure they stayed that way for the next two days. Amidst the confusion of the Harlan’s Day celebrations, it was unlikely anyone was going to miss them.

“Mind if I come aboard and take a look?”

“Uh, well, that’d be fine except, thing is, we’re about to cast off. Couple more minutes, and we’re taking her out into the Reach for the fireworks.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic. You know, I’d really love to do that.” She flexed her body at me. “I go absolutely crazy for fireworks. They make me all, I don’t know—”

“Hey, baby.” An arm slipped around my waist and violent crimson hair tickled me under the jaw. Isa snuggling against me, stripped down to cutaway swimwear and some eye-opening embedded body jewellery. She glared balefully at the blonde woman. “Who’s your new friend?”

“Oh, we haven’t, ah…” I opened an inviting hand.

The blonde woman’s mouth tightened. Maybe it was a competitive thing, maybe it was Isa’s glittery, red-veined stare. Or maybe just healthy disgust at seeing a fifteen-year-old girl hanging off a man over twice her age. Re-sleeving can and does lead to some weird body options, but anyone with the money to run a boat like Boubin Islander doesn’t have to go through them if they don’t want to. If I was fucking someone who looked fifteen, either she was fifteen, or I wanted her to look like she was, which in the end comes to pretty much the same thing.

“I think I’d better get back,” she said, and turned unsteadily about.

Listing slightly every few steps, she made as dignified a retreat as was possible on heels that stupid.

“Yeah,” Isa called after her. “Enjoy the party. See you around, maybe.”

“Isa?” I muttered.

She grinned up at me. “Yeah, what?”

“Let go of me, and go put some fucking clothes back on.”

We cast off twenty minutes later, and cruised out of the harbour on a general guidance beam. Watching the fireworks from the Reach wasn’t a stunningly original idea, and we weren’t even close to the only yacht in Tadaimako harbour heading that way. For the time being, Isa kept watch from the belowdeck cockpit and let the marine traffic interface tug us along. There’d be time to break loose later, when the show started.

In the forward master cabin, Brasil and I broke out the gear. Stealth scuba suits, Anderson-rigged, courtesy of Sierra Tres and her haiduci friends, weaponry from the hundred personal arsenals on Vchira Beach.

Isa’s customised software for the raid patched into the suits’ general purpose processors, and overlaid with a scrambler-rigged comsystem she’d stolen fresh from the factory that afternoon. Like the Boubin Islander’s comatose owners, it wouldn’t be missed for a couple of days.

We stood and looked at the assembled hardware, the gleaming black of the powered-down suits, the variously scuffed and dented weapons. There was barely enough space on the mirrorwood floor for it all.

“Just like old times, huh?”

Brasil shrugged. “No such thing as an old wave, Tak. Every time, it’s different. Looking back’s the biggest mistake you can make.”

Sarah.

“Spare me the cheap fucking beach philosophy, Jack.”

I left him in the cabin and went aft to see how Isa and Sierra Tres were getting on at the con. I felt Brasil’s gaze follow me out, and the taint of my own flaring irritation stayed with me along the corridor and up the three steps into the storm cockpit.

“Hey baby,” said Isa, when she saw me.

“Stop that.”

“Suit yourself.” She grinned unrepentantly and glanced across to where Sierra Tres was propped against the cockpit side panel. “You didn’t seem to mind so much earlier on.”

“Earlier on there was a—” I gave up. Gestured. “Suits are ready. Any word from the others?”

Sierra Tres shook her head slowly. Isa nodded at the comset datacoil.

“They’re all online, look. Green glow, all the way across the board. For now, that’s all we need or want. Anything more, it just means things have fucked up. Believe me, right now, no news is good news.”

I twisted about awkwardly in the confined space.

“Is it safe to go up on deck?”

“Yeah, sure. This is a sweet ship, it runs weather exclusion screens from generators in the rigging, I’ve got them up on partial opaque for incoming. Anyone out there nosy enough to be looking, like your little blonde friend, say, your face is just going to be a blob in the scope.”

“Good.”

I ducked out of the cockpit, moved to the stern and heaved myself into the seating area, then up onto the deck proper. This far north, the Reach was running light and the trimaran was almost steady on the swell. I picked my way forward to the fairweather cockpit, seated myself in one of the pilot chairs and dug out a fresh Erkezes cigar. There was a whole humicrate of them below, I figured the owners could spare more than a few.

Revolutionary politics—we all have to make sacrifices. Around me, the yacht creaked a little. The sky had darkened, but Daikoku stood low over the spine of Tadaimako and painted the sea with a bluish glow. The running lights of other vessels sat about, neatly separated from each other by the traffic software. Bass lines thumped faintly across the water from the glimmering shore lights of New Kanagawa and Danchi. The party was in full swing.

Southward, Rila speared up out of the sea, distant enough to appear slim and weaponish—a dark, crooked blade, unlit but for the cluster of lights from the citadel at the top.

I looked at it and smoked in silence for a while.

He’s up there.

Or somewhere downtown, looking for you.

No, he’s there. Be realistic about this.

Alright, he’s there. And so is she. So for that matter is this Aiura, and a couple of hundred hand-picked Harlan family retainers. Worry about stuff like that when you get to the top.

A launch barge slid past in the moonlight, on its way out to a firing position further up the Reach. At the rear, the deck was piled high with tumbled packages, webbing and helium cylinders. The sawn-off forward superstructure thronged with figures at rails, waving and firing flares into the night. A sharp hooting lifted from the vessel as it passed, the Harlan birthday hymn picked out in harsh collision alert blasts.

Happy birthday, motherfucker.

“Kovacs?”

It was Sierra Tres. She’d reached the cockpit without me noticing, which said either a lot for her stealth skills or as much for my lack of focus. I hoped it was the former.

“You okay?”

I considered that for a moment. “Do I not look okay?”

She made a characteristically laconic gesture and seated herself in the other pilot chair. For quite a long time, she just looked at me.

“So what’s going on with the kid?” she asked finally. “You looking to recapture your long lost youth?”

“No.” I jerked a thumb southward. “My long lost fucking youth is out there somewhere, trying to kill me. There’s nothing going on with Isa. I’m not a fucking paedophile.”

Another long, quiet spell. The launch barge slipped away into the evening. Talking to Tres was always like this. Under normal circumstances, I’d have found it irritating, but now, caught in the calm before midnight, it was curiously restful.

“How long do you think they had that viral stuff tagged to Natsume?”

I shrugged. “Hard to tell. You mean, was it long-term shadowing or a trap set specifically for us?”

“If you like.”

I knocked ash off the cigar and stared at the ember beneath. “Natsume’s a legend. Granted a dimly remembered one, but I remember him. So will the copy of me the Harlans have hired. He probably also knows by now that I talked to people back in Tekitomura, and that I know they’re holding Sylvie at Rila. He knows what I’d do, given that information. A little Envoy intuition would do the rest. If he’s in tune, then yeah, maybe he had them clip some viral watchdogs to Natsume, waiting for me to show up. With the backing he’s got now, it wouldn’t be hard to write a couple of shell personalities, have them wired in with faked credentials from one of the other Renouncer monasteries.”

I drew on the cigar, felt the bite of the smoke and let it up again.

“Then again, maybe the Harlan family had Natsume tagged from way back anyway. They’re not a forgiving lot, and him climbing Rila like that made them look stupid, even if wasn’t much more than a Quellboy poster stunt.”

Sierra was silent, staring ahead through the cockpit windscreen.

“Comes to the same thing in the end,” she said at last.

“Yes, it does. They know we’re coming.” Oddly enough, saying it made me smile. “They don’t know exactly when or exactly how, but they know.”

We watched the boats around us. I smoked the Erkezes down to a stub.

Sierra Tres sat silent and motionless.

“I guess Sanction IV was hard,” she said later.

“You guess right.”

For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.

“Ado blames you,” she told me. “So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.”

“Well, I’m a likeable guy.”

A smile bent her mouth. “So it seems.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.

“I saw you, Kovacs.”

“Saw me where?”

“Saw you with Vidaura.”

That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.

“See anything you liked?”

“I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.”

“No.” Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. “No, we weren’t.”

More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa.

Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the north eastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.

“Does Brasil know?” I asked.

Now it was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Have you told him?”

“No.”

“Has she?”

And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.

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 was accustomed to trusting her judgment amidst bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.

Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.

Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started.

It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.

Hey, she was there too.

After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.

“Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,” she said cryptically, and wandered off towards the stern.

A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fairweather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock—from several of our nearest neighbours, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.

Boubin Islander bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.

Then the real fireworks began.

“Look,” Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of child-like excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. “There go the first ones. Liftoff.”

On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy, Boubin Islander had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy—you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.

“And they’ve cut the ropes,” the presenter informed us gaily. “The balloons are rising. I can see the—”

“Do we have to have this on?” I asked.

Brasil shrugged. “Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.”

The next moment, the sky cracked open.

Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-metre demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.

The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.

The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.

Even the radio commentator shut up.

From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again, night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colours again. The scorched air snarled.

Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-metre line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images.

Radio reception died.

“Time to go,” said Brasil.

He was grinning.

So, I realised, was I.

THIRTY-ONE

The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from Boubin Islander’s dive steps, let go the rail and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of metres below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet and blew it clear of water.

Tres bobbed up, a few metres away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement.

I cast about for Brasil.

“Jack?”

His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.

“Under you. Chilly, huh?”

“Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?”

“What do you think?”

“Alright, then. You know what to do?”

I heard her sigh. “Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.”

“Got in one.”

I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colours were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.

There was a kind of comfort in that.

“Alright then.” I drew air, harder than necessary. “Let’s do this.”

I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over and began to swim.

Brasil had taken us as far south of the general traffic as was safe without attracting attention, but we were still a long way off the Crags. Under normal circumstances, getting there would have been a couple of hours’ hard work at least. Currents, sucked south through the Reach by the maelstrom, helped somewhat, but the only thing that really made the scuba approach viable was the modified buoyancy system. With electronic security in the archipelago effectively blinded and deafened by the orbital storm, no one was going to be able to pick up a one-man grav engine underwater. And with a carefully applied vector, the same power that maintained diver notation would also drive us south at machine speed.

Like seawraiths out of the Ebisu daughter legend, we slid through the darkened water an arm’s reach apart, while above us the surface of the sea bloomed silently and repeatedly with reflected angelfire. The Anderson rig clicked and bubbled gently in my ears, electrolysing oxygen directly from the water around me, blending in helium from the ultracomp mini-tank on my back, feeding it to me, then patiently shredding and dispersing my exhaled breath in bubbles no larger than fish eggs. Distantly, the maelstrom growled a bass counterpoint.

It was very peaceful.

Yeah, this is the easy part.

A memory drifted by in the flashlit gloom. Night-diving off Hirata’s reef with a girl from the upscale end of Newpest. She’d blown into Watanabe’s one night with Segesvar and some of the other Reef Warriors, part of a mixed bag of slumming daddy’s girls and Stinktown hardboys. Eva? Irena?

All I remembered was a gathered-up rope of dark honey hair, long sprawling limbs and shining green eyes. She was smoking seahemp roll-ups, badly, choking and wheezing on the rough blend with a frequency that made her harder-edged friends laugh out loud. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Making a—for me—rare effort, I peeled her away from Segesvar, who in any case seemed to be finding her a drag, parked us in a quiet corner of Watanabe’s near the kitchens, monopolised her all evening. She seemed to come from another planet entirely—a father who cared and worried about her with an attention I would have jeered at under different circumstances, a mother who worked part-time just so she doesn’t feel like a complete housewife, a home out of town that they owned, visits to Millsport and Erkezes every few months. An aunt who had gone offworld to work, they were all so proud of her, a brother who hoped to do the same. She talked about it all with the abandon of someone who believes these things to be entirely normal, and she coughed on the seahemp, and she smiled brilliantly at me, often.

So, she said on one of those occasions, what do you do for fun?

I, uh. I. Reef dive.

The smile became a laugh. Yeah, Reef Warriors, somehow I guessed. Go down much?

It was supposed to be my line, the line we all used on girls, and she’d stolen it out from under me. I didn’t even mind much.

Far side of Hirata, I blurted out. You want to try some time?

Sure, she matched me. Want to try right now?

It was deep summer in Kossuth, inland humidity had hit a hundred per cent weeks ago. The thought of getting into the water was like an infectious itch. We slipped out of Watanabe’s and I showed her how to read the autocab flows, pick out an unfared one and jump the roof. We rode it all the way across town, sweat cooling on our skin.

Hang on tight.

Yeah, I never would have thought of that, she yelled back, and laughed into my face in the slipstream.

The cab stopped for a fare near the Port Authority, and we tumbled off, scaring the prospective customers into a clutch of mannered yelps. Shock subsided into mutters and disapproving glares that sent us reeling off, stifling cackles. There was a hole in harbour security down at the eastern corner of the hoverloader docks—a blind spot torn by some pre-teen for kicks hacker the previous year; he’d sold it to the Reef Warriors for holoporn. I got us through the gap, sneaked us down to one of the ‘loader ramps and stole a real-keel tender. We poled and paddled our way silently out of the harbour, then started the motor and tore off in a wide, cream waked arc for Hirata, whooping.

Later, sunk in the silence of the dive, I looked up at the Hotei-toned, rippling surface and saw her body above me, pale against the black straps of the buoyancy jacket and the ancient compressed-air rig. She was lost in the moment, drifting, maybe gazing at the towering wall of the reef beside us, maybe just luxuriating in the cool of the sea against her skin. For about a minute, I hung below her, enjoying the view and feeling myself grow hard in the water. I traced the outlines of her thighs and hips with my eyes, zeroed in on the shaved vertical bar of hair at the base of her belly and the glimpse of lips as her legs parted languidly to kick. I stared at the taut muscled belly emerging from the lower edge of the buoyancy jacket, the obvious swelling at her chest.

Then something happened. Maybe too much seahemp, it’s never a smart idea before a dive. Maybe just some fatherly echo from my own home life. The reef edged in from the side of my vision, and for one terrible moment it seemed to be tilting massively over, falling on us. The eroticism of the languid drift in her limbs shrivelled to sudden, cramping anxiety that she was dead or unconscious. I kicked myself upward in sudden panic, grabbed her shoulders with both hands and tilted her around in the water.

And she was fine.

Eyes widened a little in surprise behind the mask, hands touching me in return. A grin split her mouth and she let air bubble out through her teeth.

Gestures, caresses. Her legs wrapped around me. She took out the regulator, gestured for me to do the same, and kissed me.

“Tak?”

Afterwards, in the gear ‘fab the Reef Warriors had blown and set atop the reef, lying with me on an improvised bed of musty winter wetsuits, she seemed surprised at how carefully I handled her.

You won’t break me, Tak. I’m a big girl.

And later, legs wrapped around me again, grinding against me, laughing delightedly.

Hang on tight!

I was too lost in her to steal her comeback from the roof of the autocab.

“Tak, you hear me?”

Eva? Ariana?

“Kovacs!”

I blinked. It was Brasil’s voice.

“Yeah, sorry. What is it?”

“Boat coming.” On the heels of his words, I picked it up as well, the scraping whine of small screws in the water, sharp over the backdrop growl of the maelstrom. I checked my proximity system, found nothing on grav trace. Went to sonar and found it, southwest and coming fast up the

Reach.

“Real-keel,” muttered Brasil. “Think we should worry?”

It was hard to believe the Harlan family would run real-keel patrol boats. Still—

“Kill the drives.” Sierra Tres said it for me. “Go to standby flotation. It’s not worth the risk.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Reluctantly, I found the buoyancy controls and shut down the grav support. Instantly, I felt myself starting to sink as the weight of my gear asserted itself. I prodded the emergency flotation dial and felt the standby chambers in the flotation jacket start to fill up. Cut it as soon as my descent stopped, and floated in the flashlit gloom, listening to the approaching whine of the boat.

Elena, maybe?

Green eyes shining

The reef tipping over onto us.

As another angelfire blast cut loose, I spotted the keel of the vessel overhead, big and sharkish, and hugely misshapen on one side. I narrowed my eyes and peered in the postblast gloom, cranking the neurachem. The boat seemed to be dragging something.

And the tension drained back out of me.

“Charter boat, guys. They’re hauling a bottleback carcass.”

The boat laboured past and faded northward on a bored drone, listing awkwardly with the weight of its prize, not even that close to us in the end.

Neurachem showed me the dead bottleback in silhouette against the blue lit surface of the water, still trailing thin threads of blood into the water.

The massive torpedo body rolled sluggishly against the bow wave, the flukes trailed like broken wings. Part of the dorsal flange had been ripped loose at some point and now it flogged back and forth in water, blurred at the edges with ragged lumps and tendrils of tissue. Loose cabling tangled alongside. Looked as if they’d harpooned it a few times—whoever had chartered the boat clearly wasn’t that great a fisherman.

When humans first arrived on Harlan’s World, the bottlebacks didn’t have any natural predators. They were the top of the food chain, magnificently adapted marine hunters and highly intelligent, social animals.

Nothing the planet had evolved recently was up to killing them.

We soon changed that.

“Hope that’s not an omen,” murmured Sierra Tres unexpectedly.

Brasil made a noise in his throat. I vented the emergency chambers on the buoyancy jacket and snapped the grav system back on. The water seemed suddenly colder around me. Behind the automatic motions of course check and gear trim, I could feel a vague, undefined anger seeping into me.

“Let’s get this done, guys.”

But the mood was still with me twenty minutes later when we crept into the shallows at the base of Rila, pulsing at my temples and behind my eyes.

And projected on the glass of my scuba mask, the pale red route-pointers from Natsume’s simulation software seemed to flare in time with the ratcheting of my own blood. The urge to do damage was a rising tide inside me, like wakefulness, like hilarity.

We found the channel Natsume had recommended, eased through with gloved hands braced against rock and coral outcrops to avoid snagging.

Levered ourselves up out of the water onto a narrow ledge that the software had tinted and flagged with a slightly demonic smiling face. Entry level, Natsume had said, shedding his monkish demeanour for a fleeting moment. Knock, knock. I got myself braced and took stock. Faint silvery light from Daikoku touched the sea, but Hotei had still not risen and the spray from the maelstrom and nearby wavecrash fogged what light there was. The view was mostly gloom. Angelfire sent shadows scurrying past on the rocks as another firework package burst somewhere to the north.

Thunder rippled across the sky. I scanned the cliff above for a moment, then the darkened sea we’d just climbed out of. No sign we’d been noticed.

I detached the dive helmet’s frame from the mask and lifted it off. Shed my flippers and flexed the toes of the rubber boots underneath.

“Everybody okay?”

Brasil grunted an affirmative. Tres nodded. I secured the helmet frame at my belt in the small of my back where it wouldn’t get in the way, stripped off my gloves and stowed them in a pouch. Settled the now lightweight mask a little more comfortably on my face, and checked that the datafeed was still securely jacked in. Tipping my head back, I saw Natsume’s route march off above us in clearly marked red hand- and footholds.

“You all seeing this okay?”

“Yeah.” Brasil grinned. “Kind of spoils the fun, doesn’t it? Marking it out like that.”

“You want to go first then?”

“After you, Mister Eishundo.”

Without giving myself time to think about it, I reached up and grasped the first indicated hold, braced my feet and heaved myself onto the cliff.

Swung up and found a grip with my other hand. The rock was wet with maelstrom mist, but the Eishundo grip held. I brought a leg across to fit against an angled ledge, swung again and grasped.

And left the ground behind.

Nothing to it.

The thought zipped through my mind after I’d gone about twenty metres, and left a slightly manic grin in its wake. Natsume had warned me that the early stages of the climb were deceptive. It’s apeman stuff, he said seriously. Lots of wide swings and grabs, big moves and your strength’s good at this stage. You’re going to feel good. Just remember it doesn’t last.

I pursed my lips, chimpanzee-like and hooted gently through them.

Below me, the sea smashed and gnawed restlessly at rock. The sound and scent of it came bouncing up the cliff face and wrapped me in windings of chill and damp. I shrugged off a shudder.

Swing up. Grab.

Very slowly, it grew on me that the Envoy conditioning hadn’t yet come online against my vertigo. With the rock face less than half a metre in front of my face and the Eishundo muscle system thrumming on my bones, it was almost possible to forget that there was a drop below. The rock lost the coating of spray from the maelstrom as we climbed higher, the repeating roar of waves faded to distant white noise. The gekko grip on my hands made glassy, treacherous holds laughably comfortable. And more than all of these factors, or maybe the culminating Eishundo touch, what I’d told Natsume seemed to be true—the sleeve knew how to do this.

Then, as I reached a set of holds and ledges whose markers the mask display labelled with a restpoint symbol, I looked down to see how Brasil and Tres were doing, and ruined it all.

Sixty metres below—not even a third of the whole climb—the sea was a blackened fleece, touched with Daikoku silver where it rippled. The skirt of rocks at the base of Rila sat in the water like solid shadows. The two big ones that framed the channel where we’d come in now looked as if they’d fit into my hand. The back and forth sluice of water between them was hypnotic, pulling me downward. The view seemed to pivot dizzyingly.

The conditioning came on line, flattening the fear. Like airlock doors in my head. My gaze came up again to face the rock. Sierra Tres reached up and tapped my foot.

“Okay?”

I realised I’d been frozen for the best part of a minute.

“Just resting.”

The marked trail of holds leaned left, an upward diagonal around a broad buttress that Natsume had warned us was pretty much unclimbable.

Instead he’d lain back and moved almost upside down under the chin of the buttress, feet jammed against minute folds and fissures in the stone, fingers pinching angles of rock that barely deserved the name hold, until he could finally get both hands on a series of sloped ledges at the far side and haul himself back into a nearly vertical position.

I gritted my teeth and started to do the same.

Halfway there, my foot slipped, swung my weight out and pulled my right hand off the rock. An involuntary grunt, and I was dangling left handed, feet flailing for purchase far too low to find anything apart from empty air. I would have screamed but the barely recovering sinews in my left arm were doing it for me.

“Fuck!”

Hang on tight.

The gekko grip held.

I curled upward from the waist, craning my neck to see the marked footholds in the glass of the mask. Short, panicky breaths. I got one foot lodged against a bubble of stone. Tiny increments of strain came off my left arm. Unable to see clearly with the mask, I reached up in the dark with my right hand and felt about on the rock for another hold.

Found it.

Moved my braced foot fractionally and jammed the other one in next to it.

Hung, panting.

No, don’t fucking stop!

It took all my willpower to move my right hand for the next hold. Two more moves, and it took the same sickening effort to look for the next.

Three more moves, a fractionally improved angle, and I realised I was almost to the other side of the buttress. I reached up, found the first of the sloping ledges and dragged myself hyperventilating and cursing upright. A genuine, deeply grooved hold offered itself. I got my feet to the lowest ledge. Sagged with relief against the cool stone.

Get yourself up out of the fucking way, Tak. Don’t leave them hanging about down there.

I scrambled up the next set of holds until I was on top of the buttress. A broad shelf glowed red in the mask display, smiling face floating above it.

Rest point. I waited there while Sierra Tres and then Brasil emerged from below and joined me. The big surfer was grinning like a kid.

“Had me worried there, Tak.”

“Just. Don’t. Fucking don’t, alright.”

We rested for about ten minutes. Over our heads, the battlement flange of the citadel was now clearly visible, clean cut edges emerging from the chaotic angles of the natural rock it jutted above. Brasil nodded upward.

“Not far to go now, eh?”

“Yeah, and only the ripwings to worry about.” I dug out the repellent spray and squirted myself liberally with it all over. Tres and Brasil followed suit. It had a thin, faintly green odour that seemed stronger in the fitful darkness. It might not drive a ripwing away under all and any circumstances, but it would certainly put them off. And if that wasn’t enough …

I drew the Rapsodia from its holster on my lower ribs and pressed it to a utility patch on my chest. It clung there, easily to hand in fractions of a second, always assuming I could spare the hand to grab it in the first place.

Faced with the prospect of meeting a cliff full of angry, startled ripwings with young to defend, I would have preferred the heavy-duty Sunjet blaster on my back, but there was no way I could wield it effectively. I grimaced, adjusted the mask and checked the datajack again. Drew a deep breath and reached for the next set of handholds.

Now the cliff face grew convex, bulging out and forcing us to climb at a sustained backward lean of twenty degrees. The path Natsume had taken wove back and forth across the rock, governed by the sparse availability of decent holds, and even then opportunities to rest were few and far between.

By the time the bulge faded back to a vertical, my arms were aching from shoulder to fingertip, and my throat was raw from panting.

Hang on tight.

I found a display-marked diagonal crack, moved up it to give the others space and jammed an arm in up to the elbow. Then I hung there limply, collecting breath.

The smell hit me about the same time as I saw the gossamer thin streamers of white dangling from above.

Oily, acidic.

Here we go.

I twisted my head and stared upward for confirmation. We were directly below the colony’s nesting band. The whole expanse of rock was thickly plastered with the creamy webbing secretion that ripwing embryos were birthed directly into and lived in for their four-month gestation. Evidently, somewhere just above me, mature hatchlings had torn their way free and either taken wing or tumbled incompetently to a Darwinian conclusion in the sea below.

Let’s not think about that right now, eh?

I cranked the neurachem vision, and scanned the colony. Dark shapes preened and flapped here and there on protruding crags in the mass of white, but there weren’t many of them. Ripwings, Natsume assured us, don’t spend a lot of time at the nests. No eggs to keep warm, and the embryos feed directly off the webbing. Like most hardcore climbers, he was a part-time expert on the creatures. You’re going to get a few sentinels, the odd birthing female and maybe some well-fed parents secreting more gunge onto their particular patch. If you go carefully, they may leave you alone.

I grimaced again, and began to work my way up the crack. The oily stink intensified, and shreds of torn webbing began to adhere to my suit. The chameleochrome system blanched to match wherever the stuff touched. I stopped breathing through my nose. A quick glance down past my boots showed me the others following, faces contorted with the smell.

And then, inevitably, the crack ran out and the display said that the next set of holds were buried beneath the webbing. I nodded drearily to myself and plunged a hand into the mess, wriggling fingers around until they found a spur of rock that resembled the red model in the display. It seemed pretty solid. A second plunge into the webbing gave me another, even better hold and I hacked sideways with one foot, looking for a ledge that was also covered in the stuff. Now, even breathing through my mouth, I could taste the oil at the back of my throat.

This was far worse than the climb over the bulge. The holds were good, but each time you had to force your hand or foot through the thick, clinging webs until it was secure. You had to watch out for the vague shadows of embryos hung up inside the stuff, because even embryonic they could bite, and the surge of fear hormones they’d release through the webbing if you touched them would hit the air like a chemical siren. The sentinels would be on us seconds after, and I didn’t rate our chances of fighting them off without falling.

Stick your hand in. Flex it about.

Get a grip. Move.

Pull clear and shake your hand free. Gag at the liberated stink. Stick your hand back in.

By now we were coated with clinging strands of the stuff and I was finding it hard to remember what climbing on clean rock had been like. At the edges of a nearly cleared patch, I passed a dead and rotting hatchling, caught upside down by the talons in a freak knot of webbing it hadn’t been strong enough to break before it starved to death. It added new, sickly sweet layers of decay to the stink. Higher up, a nearly-grown embryo seemed to turn its beaked head to look at me as I reached gingerly into the gunge half a metre away.

I drew myself up over a ledge made rounded and sticky by webbing.

The ripwing lunged at me.

Probably, it was as startled as I was. Rising mist of repellent and the bulky black figure that came after, you could see how it would be. It went for my eyes with a repeated stabbing movement, punched the mask instead and jerked my head back. The beak made a skittering noise on the glass. I lost my left-hand grip, pivoted on the right. The ripwing croaked and hunched closer, stabbing at my throat. I felt the serrated edge of the beak gouge skin. Out of options, I dragged myself back hard against the ledge with my right hand. My left whiplashed out, neurachem-swift, and grabbed the fucking thing by the neck. I ripped it off the ledge and hurled it downward. There was another startled croak, then an explosion of leathery wings below me. Sierra Tres yelled.

I got another grip with my left hand and peered down. They were both still there. The ripwing was a retreating winged shadow, soaring away out to sea. I unlocked my breath again.

“You okay?”

“Can you please not do that again,” gritted Brasil.

I didn’t have to. Natsume’s route took us through an area of torn and used-up webbing next, finally over a narrow band of thicker secretion and then we were clear. A dozen good holds after that and we were crouched on a worked stone platform under the main battlement flange of the Rila citadel.

Tight, traded grins. There was enough space on the platform to sit down. I tapped the induction mike.

“Isa?”

“Yes, I’m here.” Her voice came through uncharacteristically high pitched, hurried with tension. I grinned again.

“We’re at the top. Better let the others know.”

“Alright.”

I settled back against the stonework and breathed out loose lipped.

Stared out at the horizon.

“I do not want to have to do that again.”

“Still this bit left,” said Tres, jerking her thumb upward at the flange. I followed the motion and looked at the underside of the battlement.

Settlement-Years architecture. Natsume had been almost scornful. So fucking baroque, they might as well have built a ladder into it. And the glimmer of pride that all his time as a Renouncer didn’t seem to have taken away. ‘course, they never expected anyone to get up there in the first place.

I examined the ranks of carving on the upward sloping underside of the flange. Mostly, it was the standard wing-and-wave motifs, but in places there were stylised faces representing Konrad Harlan and some of his more notable relatives from the Settlement era. Every ten square centimetres of stonework offered a decent hold. The distance out to the edge of the flange was less than three metres. I sighed and got back to my feet.

“Okay then.”

Brasil braced himself next to me, peering up the angle of the stone.

“Looks easy enough, eh? Think there are any sensors?”

I pressed the Rapsodia against my chest to make sure it was still secure.

Loosened the blaster in its sheath on my back. Got back to my feet.

“Who fucking cares.”

I reached up, stuck a fist in Konrad Harlan’s eye and dug in with my fingers. Then I climbed out over the drop before I could think about it.

About thirty hanging seconds and I was onto the vertical wall. I found similar carvings to work with and seconds later was crouched on a three-metre-broad parapet, peering down into a cloister-lined, tear-shaped ornamental space of raked gravel and painstakingly aligned rocks. A small statue of Harlan stood near the centre, head bowed and hands folded meditatively, overshadowed at the rear by an idealised Martian whose wings were spread in protection and conferral of power. At the far end of the rounded space, a regal arch led away, I knew, to the shadowed courtyards and gardens of the citadel’s guest wing. The perfume of herbs and ledgefruit blew past me, but there was no local noise beyond the breeze itself. The guests, it appeared were all across in the central complex, where lights blazed and the sounds of celebration came and went with the wind. I strained the neurachem and picked out cheers, elegant music that Isa would have hated, a voice raised in song that was quite beautiful.

I pulled the Sunjet from its sheath on my back and clicked the power on.

Waiting there in the darkness on the edge of the party, hands full of death, I felt momentarily like some evil spirit out of legend. Brasil and Tres came up behind me and fanned out on the parapet. The big surfer had a heavy antique frag rifle cradled in his arms, Tres hefted her blaster left-handed to make room for the Kalashnikov solid-load in her right. There was a distant look on her face and she seemed to be weighing the two weapons for balance, or as if she might throw them. The night sky split with angelfire and lit us, bluish and unreal. Thunder rumbled like an incitement. Under it all, the maelstrom called.

“Alright then,” I said softly.

“Yes, that’s probably far enough,” said a woman’s voice from the garden perfumed shadows. “Put down your weapons, please.”

THIRTY-TWO

Figures, armed and armoured, stepped out of the cloistering. At least a dozen of them. Here and there, I could see a pale face, but most wore bulky enhanced-vision masks, and tactical marine-style helmets. Combat armour hugged their chests and limbs like extra muscle. The weaponry was equally heavy-duty. Shard blasters with gape-mouthed dispersal fittings, frag rifles about a century newer than the one Jack Soul Brasil had brought to the party. A couple of hip-mounted plasmaguns. No one up in the Harlan eyrie was taking any chances.

I lowered the barrel of the Sunjet gently to point at the stone parapet.

Kept a loose grip on the butt. Peripheral vision told me Brasil had done the same with the frag rifle, and that Sierra Tres had her arms at her sides.

“Yes, I really meant relinquish your weapons,” said the same woman urbanely. “As in put them down altogether. Perhaps my Amanglic is not as idiomatic as it could be.”

I turned in the direction the voice came from.

“That you, Aiura?”

There was a long pause, and then she stepped out of the archway at the end of the ornamental space. Another orbital discharge lit her for a moment, then the gloom sank back and I had to use neurachem to keep the detail. The Harlan security executive was the epitome of First Family beauty—elegant, almost ageless Eurasian features, jet-black hair sculpted back in a static field that seemed to both crown and frame the pale of her face. A mobile intelligence of lips and gaze, the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes to denote a life lived. A tall, slim frame wrapped in a simple quilted jacket in black and dark red with the high collar of office, matching slacks loose enough to appear a full-length court gown when she stood still. Flat-heeled shoes that she could run or fight in if she had to. A shard pistol. Not aimed, not quite lowered.

She smiled in the dim light.

“I am Aiura, yes.”

“Got my fuckhead younger self there with you?”

Another smile. A flicker of eyebrows as she glanced sideways, back the way she’d come. He stepped out of the shadowed archway. There was a grin on his face, but it didn’t look very firmly anchored.

“Here I am, old man. Got something to say to me?”

I eyed the tanned combat frame, the gathered stance and the bound back hair. Like some fucking bad guy from a cut-rate samurai flic.

“Nothing you’d listen to,” I told him. “I’m just trying to sort out the idiot count here.”

“Yeah? Well I’m not the one who just climbed two hundred metres so he could walk into an ambush.”

I ignored the jibe, and looked back at Aiura, who was watching me with amused curiosity.

“I’m here for Sylvie Oshima,” I said quietly.

My younger self coughed laughter. Some of the armoured men and women took it up, but it didn’t last. They were too nervous, there were still too many guns in play. Aiura waited for the last guffaws to skitter out.

“I think we’re all aware of that, Kovacs-san. But I fail to see how you’re going to accomplish your goal.”

“Well, I’d like you to go and fetch her for me.”

More grating laughter. But the security exec’s smile had paled out and she gestured sharply for quiet.

“Be serious, Kovacs-san. I don’t have unlimited patience.”

“Believe me, nor do I. And I’m tired. So you’d better send a couple of our men down to get Sylvie Oshima from whatever interrogation chamber you’re holding her in, and you’d better hope she’s not been harmed in any way, because if she has, this negotiation is over.”

Now it had grown quiet again in the stone garden. There was no more laughter. Envoy conviction, the tone in my voice, the choice of words, the ease in my stance—these things told them to believe.

“With what exactly are you negotiating, Kovacs-san?”

“With the head of Mitzi Harlan,” I said simply.

The quiet cranked tight. Aiura’s face might have been graven from stone for all the reaction it showed. But something in the way she stood changed and I knew I had her.

“Aiura-san, I am not bluffing. Konrad Harlan’s favourite granddaughter was taken by a Quellist assault team in Danchi two minutes ago. Her Secret Service detachment is dead, as is anyone else who mistakenly tried to come to her aid. You have been focused in the wrong place. And you now have less than thirty minutes to render me Sylvie Oshima unharmed—after that, I have no influence over the outcomes. Kill us, take us prisoner. It won’t matter. None of it will make any difference. Mitzi Harlan will die in great pain.”

The moment pivoted. Up on the parapet, it was cool and quiet and I could hear the maelstrom faintly. It was a solid, carefully-engineered plan, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t get me killed. I wondered what would happen if someone shot me off the edge. If I’d be dead before I hit.

“Crabshit!” It was me. He’d stepped towards the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. “You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—”

I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathised—the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.

“Wouldn’t I?” I gestured, “You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there—they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.”

Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.

“You’ll forgive me,” she said politely, “if I don’t take this on trust.”

I nodded. “Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.”

It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed.

She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.

“How do you plan to leave?” she asked me.

“Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain a half dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.”

“Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,” drawled Kovacs. “Not a good time to be flying, tonight.”

I stared back at him with dislike. “I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”

“And Mitzi Harlan?” The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. “What assurances do I have of her safety?”

Brasil stirred at my side, for the first time since the confrontation began.

“We are not murderers.”

“No?” Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. “Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.”

For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. “Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—”

“I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,” I said loudly. “Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.”

Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.

I saw the decision take root in her.

“Very well,” she said briskly. “You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.”

I smeared her a brief smile. “Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?”

They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.

I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.

“Is that her?” asked Tres tautly.

I lifted my free hand. “Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?”

“I would advise against overreaction.” But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were.

“The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.”

My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.

“Have you fed her?” I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.

“Intravenously.” Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. “You must understand that—”

“We understand perfectly,” said Brasil, “We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.”

He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle.

Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.

“Stand down. All of you.”

I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, “You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.”

A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced towards us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.

I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot, then she looked back at me and gestured an okay. I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.

“Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her. Everybody else stays back.”

It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted round to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the grey-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.

And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoopcopter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer

“You what?”

She leaned closer again. Spoke directly and sibilantly into my ear.

“I said, you send her back to me whole, Kovacs. These joke revolutionaries, that’s a fight we can have another time. But they harm any part of Mitzi Harlan’s mind or body and I’ll spend the rest of my existence hunting you down.”

I grinned back at her in the noise. I raised my voice as she drew back.

“You don’t frighten me, Aiura. I’ve been dealing with scum like you all my life. You’ll get Mitzi back because I said you would. But if you really care that much about her, you’d better start planning some lengthy holidays for her offworld. These guys aren’t nicking about.”

She looked down at Sylvie Oshima.

“It isn’t her, you know,” she shouted. “There’s no way for it to be her. Quellcrist Falconer is dead. Really dead.”

I nodded. “Okay. So if that’s the case, how come she’s got all you First Family fucks so bent out of shape?”

The security exec’s shout became genuinely agitated. “Why? Because, Kovacs, whoever this is—and it’s not Quell—whoever this is, she’s brought back a plague from the Uncleared. A whole new form of death. You ask her about the Qualcrist Protocol when she wakes up, and then ask yourself if what I’ve done here to stop her is so terrible.”

“Boy!” It was my younger self, elbows crooked under Sylvie’s knees, hands spread expressively wide beneath. “Are we going to load this bitch, or are you going to stand there talking about it all night?”

I held his gaze for a long moment, then lifted Sylvie’s head and shoulders carefully up to where Sierra Tres waited in the swoopcopter’s cramped cabin. The other Kovacs shoved hard and the rest of her body slid in after. The move brought him up close beside me.

“This isn’t over,” he yelled in my ear. “You and I have some unfinished business.”

I levered one arm under Sylvie Oshima’s knee, and elbowed him back, away from her. Gazes locked.

“Don’t fucking tempt me,” I shouted. “You bought-and-paid-for little shit.”

He bristled. Brasil surged up close. Aiura laid a hand on my younger self’s arm, and spoke intently into his ear. He backed off. Raised one pistol finger and stabbed it at me. What he said was lost in the wash of the rotors.

Then the Harlan security exec was shepherding him away, back along the parapet to a safe distance. I swung myself aboard the Dracul, made space beside me for Brasil and nodded at Sierra Tres. She spoke directly to the pilot and the swoopcopter loosened its hold on the parapet. I stared out at the other, younger Kovacs. Watched him stare back.

We lifted away.

Beside me, Brasil had a grin plastered across his face like the mask for some ceremony I hadn’t been invited to attend. I nodded back at him wearily. Suddenly, I was shattered, mind and body. The long swim, the unrelenting strain and near-death moments of the climb, the tightwired tension of the face-off—it all came crashing back down on me.

“We did it, Tak,” Brasil bellowed.

I shook my head. Mustered my voice

“So far, so good,” I countered.

“Ah, don’t be like that.”

I shook my head again. Braced in the doorway, I leaned out of the swoopcopter and stared down at the rapidly shrinking array of lights from the Rila citadel. With unaided vision, I couldn’t see any of the figures in the stone garden any more, and I was too tired to crank up the neurachem.

But even over the rapidly increasing space between us, I could still feel his stare, and the unforgiving rage kindled in it.

THIRTY-THREE

We picked up Boubin Islander exactly where she was supposed to be. Isa’s seamanship, via the trimaran’s pilot software, had been impeccable. Sierra Tres talked to the pilot, who seemed, on admittedly very brief acquaintance, to be a decent sort of guy. Given his status as a hostage, he’d shown little nervousness during the flight and once he said something to Sierra Tres that made her laugh out loud. Now he nodded laconically as she spoke into his ear, maxed up a couple of displays on his flight board and the swoopcopter fell away towards the yacht. I gestured for the spare comset again, and fitted it to my ear.

“Still there, Aiura?”

Her voice came back, precise and terrifyingly polite. “I am still listening, Kovacs-san.”

“Good. We’re about to set down. Your flyer here knows to back off rapidly, but just to underline the point, I want the sky clear in all directions—”

“Kovacs-san, I do not have the authority to—”

“Then get it. I don’t believe for a moment that Konrad Harlan can’t have the skies over the whole Millsport Archipelago emptied if he wants it, even if you can’t. So listen carefully. If I see a helicopter anywhere above our horizon for the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see an airborne trace on our radar any time in the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see any vessel at all following us, Mitzi Harlan—”

“You’ve made your point, Kovacs.” The courtesy in her voice was fast evaporating. “You will not be followed.”

“Thank you.”

I tossed the comset back onto the seat next to the pilot. Outside the swoopcopter, the rushing air was murky. There hadn’t been an orbital discharge since we took off, and it looked from the lack of fireworks to the north as if the light show was winding down. Thick cloud was drawing in from the west, smothering the rising edge of Hotei. Higher up, Daikoku was thinly veiled and Marikanon gone altogether. It looked as if it might rain.

The Dracul made a tight circle over the trimaran, and I saw a white-faced Isa on deck, waving one of Brasil’s antique frag rifles unconvincingly.

A smile touched the corners of my mouth at the sight. We backed off on the turn and dropped to sea level, then sideslipped in towards the Boubin Islander. I stood in the doorway and waved slowly. Isa’s taut features collapsed in relief and she lowered the frag gun. The pilot perched his craft on the corner of Boubin Islander’s deck and shouted to us over his shoulder.

“End of the ride, people.”

We jumped down, eased Sylvie’s still semi-conscious form out after us and lowered her carefully to the deck. Maelstrom mist coated us like the cold breath of sea sprites. I leaned back into the swoopcopter.

“Thanks. Very smooth. You’d better get out of here.”

He nodded and I stepped back. The Dracul ungrabbed and lifted away.

The nose turned and in seconds it was a hundred metres off, rising into the night sky on a muted chatter. As the noise faded, I turned my attention back to the woman at my feet. Brasil was bent over her, peeling back an eyelid.

“Doesn’t seem to be in too bad shape,” he muttered as I knelt beside him.

“She’s running a light fever, but her breathing’s okay. I’ve got gear below I can check her out with better.”

I put the back of my hand against her cheek. Under the film of spray from the maelstrom, it was hot and papery, the way it had been back in the Uncleared. And for all Brasil’s informed medical opinion, her breathing didn’t sound all that good to me either.

Yeah, well, this is a man who favours recreational virals over drugs. Guess light fever’s a relative term, eh Micky?

Micky? What happened to Kovacs?

Kovacs is back there, crawling up Aiura Harlan’s crack. That’s what happened to Kovacs.

The bright anger, glinting.

“How about we get her below,” suggested Sierra Tres.

“Yeah,” said Isa unkindly. “She looks like shit, man.”

I held down a sudden, irrational flare of dislike. “Isa, what’s the news from Koi’s end?”

“Uh.” She shrugged. “Last time I checked, fine, they were moving—”

“Last time you checked? What the fuck is that, Isa? How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know, I was watching the radar for you!” Her voice rose with hurt. “Saw you were coming in, I thought—”

“How fucking long, Isa?”

She bit her lip and stared back at me. “Not long, alright!”

“You st—” I clenched a fist at my side. Summoned calm. It wasn’t her fault, none of this was her fault. “Isa, I need you to go down and get on the comset right now. Please. Call in, check with Koi that everything’s okay. Tell him we’re done here, we’re on our way out.”

“Okay.” The hurt was still in her face and tone. “I’m going.”

I watched her go, sighed and helped Brasil and Tres lift Sylvie Oshima’s limp, overheated body. Her head lolled back and I had to shift one hand up quickly to support it. The mane of grey hair seemed to twitch in places as it hung, damp with spray, but it was a feeble movement. I looked down into the pale and flushed face and felt my jaw tighten with frustration. Isa was right, she did look like shit. Not what you thought of when you imagined the flashing-eyed, lithe-limbed combat heroine of the Unsettlement.

Not what you’d expect when men like Koi talked of a woken and vengeful ghost.

I don’t know, she’s well on her way to the ghost part.

Ha fucking ha.

Isa appeared at the top of the stern companion way, just as we got there.

Wrapped up in my own sour thoughts, it took me a moment to look up at her face. And by then, it was too late.

“Kovacs, I’m sorry,” she pleaded.

The swoopcopter.

Faintly, the soft strop of rotors, rising out of the backdrop noise from the maelstrom. Death and fury approaching, on ninja wings.

“They’re down,” Isa cried. “First Family commandos tracked them. Ado’s hit, the rest of them are. Half of them are. They got Mitzi Harlan.”

“Who did?” Sierra Tres, eyes gone uncharacteristically wide. “Who’s got her now? Koi or—”

But I already knew the answer to that one.

“Incoming!”

I screamed it. Was already trying to get Sylvie Oshima to the deck without dropping her. Brasil had the same idea, but he was moving in the wrong direction. Sylvie’s body tugged between us. Sierra Tres yelled. We all seemed to be moving in mud, gracelessly slow.

Like a million furious watersprites let loose, the hail of machine-gun fire ripped out of the ocean on our stern, then up across Boubin Islander’s lovingly finished deck. Eerily, it was silent. Water splashed and splattered, harmlessly quiet and playful. Wood and plastic leapt out of everything in splinters around us. Isa screamed.

I got Sylvie down in the stern seats. Landed on top of her. Out of the darkened sky, hard on the heels of its own silenced machine-gun fire, the Dracul machine came hammering across the water at strafing height.

The guns started up again and I rolled off the seat, dragging Sylvie’s unresponsive form down with me. Something blunt smashed against my ribs as I hit the ground in the confined space. I felt the swoopcopter’s shadow pass across me and then it was gone, quietened motors muttering in its wake.

“Kovacs?” It was Brasil, from above on the deck.

“Still here. You?”

“He’s coming back.”

“Of course he fucking is.” I poked my head out of cover and saw the Dracul banking about in the mist-blurred air. The first run had been a stealth assault—he didn’t know we weren’t expecting him. Now it didn’t matter. He’d take his time, sit out at a distance and chew us to shreds.

Motherfucker.

It geysered out of me. All the stored-up fight that the stand-off with Aiura hadn’t allowed a discharge for. I flailed upright in the stern seats, got a grip on the companionway coating and hauled myself onto the deck.

Brasil was crouched there, frag rifle cradled in both arms. He nodded grimly forward. I followed the look and the rage took a new twist inside me. Sierra Tres lay with one leg smashed to red glinting fragments. Isa was down near her, drenched in blood. Her breath was coming in tight little gasps. A couple of metres off, the frag rifle she’d brought up on deck lay abandoned.

I ran to it, scooped it up like a loved child.

Brasil opened fire from the other side of the deck. His frag rifle went off with a ripping, cracking roar and muzzle flash stabbed out a metre from the end of the barrel. The swoopcopter swung in from the right, flinching upward as the pilot spotted the fire. More machine-gun slugs ripped across Boubin Islander’s masts with a pinging sound, too high to worry about. I braced myself against the gently pitching deck and put the stock to my shoulder. Lined up, and started shooting as the Dracul drifted back. The rifle roared in my ear. Not much hope of a hit, but standard frag load is proximity fused and maybe, just maybe—

Maybe he’ll slow down enough for you to get close? Come on, Micky.

For a moment, I remembered the Sunjet, dropped on the parapet as I lifted Sylvie Oshima. If I’d had it now I could have this motherfucker out of the sky as easy as spitting.

Yeah, instead, you’re stuck with one of Brasil’s museum pieces. Nice going,

Micky. That mistake is about to kill you.

The second source of ground fire seemed to have rattled the pilot slightly, for all that nothing we were throwing into the sky had touched him. Maybe he wasn’t a military flyer. He passed over us again at a steep, side-slipping angle, almost snagging on the masts. He was low enough that I saw his masked face peering downward as he banked the machine. Teeth gritted in fury, face soaked with the upcast spray of the maelstrom, I followed him with frag fire, trying to keep him in the sight long enough to get a hit.

And then, in the midst of the gunsnarl and drifting mist, something exploded near the Dracul’s tail. One of us had managed to put a frag shell close enough for proximity fusing. The swoopcopter staggered and pivoted about. It seemed undamaged, but the near miss must have scared the pilot. He kicked his craft upward again, backing around us in a wide, rising arc. The silent machine-gun fire kicked in again, came ripping across the deck towards me. The magazine of the frag gun emptied, locked open. I threw myself sideways, hit the deck and slid towards the rail on spray-slick wood—

And the angelfire reached down.

Out of nowhere, a long probing finger of blue. It stabbed out of the clouds, sliced across the spray-soaked air and abruptly the swoopcopter was gone. No more machine-gun fire scuttling greedily at me, no explosion, no real noise outside the crackle of abused air molecules in the path of the beam. The sky where the Dracul had been caught fire, flared up and then faded into the glow of an afterimage on my retina.

—and I slammed into the rail.

For a long moment there was only the sound of the maelstrom and the slap of wavelets against the hull just below me. I craned my head up and stared. The sky remained stubbornly empty.

“Got you, you motherfucker,” I whispered to it.

Memory slotted. I got myself upright and ran to where Isa and Sierra Tres both lay in running swipes of spray-diluted blood. Tres had propped herself against the side of the fairweather cockpit, and was tying herself a tourniquet from shreds of blood-soaked cloth. Her teeth gritted as she pulled it tight—a single grunt of pain got past her. She caught my eye and nodded, then rolled her head to where Brasil crouched beside Isa, hands frantic over the teenager’s sprawled body. I came and peered over his shoulder.

She must have taken six or seven slugs through the stomach and legs.

Below the chest, it looked as if she’d been savaged by a swamp panther.

Her face was still now, and the panting breaths from before had slowed.

Brasil looked up at me and shook his head.

“Isa?” I got on my knees beside her in her blood. “Isa, talk to me.”

“Kovacs?” She tried to roll her head towards me, but it barely moved. I leaned closer, put my face close to hers.

“I’m here, Isa.”

“I’m sorry Kovacs,” she moaned. Her voice was a little girl’s, barely above a high whisper. “I didn’t think.”

I swallowed. “Isa—”

“I’m sorry—”

And, abruptly, she stopped breathing.

THIRTY-FOUR

At the heart of the maze-like group of islets and reefs wryly named Eltevedtem, there was once a tower over two kilometres high. The Martians built it directly up from the seabed, for reasons best known to themselves, and just short of half a million years ago, equally inexplicably, it fell into the ocean. Most of the wreckage ended up littered across the local seabed, but in places you can still find massive, shattered remnants on land. Over time, the ruins became part of the landscape of whichever islet or reef they had smashed down onto, but even this subliminal presence was enough to ensure that Eltevedtem remained largely unpeopled. The fishing villages on the northern arm of the Millsport Archipelago, at a couple of dozen kilometres distant, were the closest human habitation. Millsport itself lay over a hundred kilometres further south. And Eltevedtem (lost in one of the pre-Settlement Magyar dialects) could have swallowed a whole flotilla of shallow-draught vessels, if said flotilla didn’t want to be found. There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.

It was a good place to hide.

From external pursuers, anyway.

I leaned on Boubin Islander’s rail and stared down into limpid waters.

Five metres below the surface, a brightly-coloured mix of native and colonial fish nosed around the white spraycrete sarcophagus we’d buried Isa in. I had some vague idea about contacting her family once we got clear, to let them know where she was, but it seemed a pointless gesture.

When a sleeve is dead, it’s dead. And Isa’s parents weren’t going to be any less sick with worry when a recovery team cracked open the spraycrete and found someone had carved the stack out of her spine.

It lay in my pocket now, Isa’s soul, for want of a better descriptor, and I could feel something changing in me with the solitary weight it made against my fingers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t dare leave it for anyone else to find either. Isa was solidly implicated in the Millsport raid, and that meant a virtual interrogation suite up at Rila Crags if she was ever retrieved. For now, I would have to carry her, the way I’d carried dead priests southward to punishment, the way I’d carried Yukio Hirayasu and his gangster colleague in case I needed them to bargain with.

I’d left the yakuza stacks buried in the sand under Brasil’s house on Vchira Beach, and I hadn’t expected the pocket to fill again so soon. Had even, on the voyage east to Millsport, caught myself taking occasional, momentary pleasure in the strange new lack of carriage, until the memories of Sarah and the habit of hatred came searing back.

Now the pocket was weighted again, like some fucked-up modern day variant on the Ebisu-cursed trawl net in the Tanaka legend, destined forever to bring up the bodies of drowned sailors and nothing much else.

There didn’t seem to be any way for it to stay empty, and I didn’t know what I felt any more.

For nearly two years, it hadn’t been that way. Certainty had coloured my existence a grained monochrome. I’d been able to reach into my pocket and weigh its varying contents in my palm with a dark, hardened satisfaction.

There was a sense of slow accumulation, an assembly of tiny increments in the balance pan that sat opposite the colossal tonnage of Sarah Sachilowska’s extinction. For two years I’d needed no purpose other than that pocket and its handful of stolen souls. I’d needed no future, no outlook that didn’t revolve around feeding the pocket and the swamp panther pens at Segesvar’s place out on the Expanse.

Really? So what happened at Tekitomura?

Movement on the rail. The cables thrummed and bounced gently. I looked up and saw Sierra Tres maneuvering herself forward, braced on the rail with both arms and hopping on her uninjured leg. Her usually inexpressive face was taut with frustration. Under different circumstances, it might have been comical, but from the hacked-off trousers at mid-thigh, her other leg was encased in transparent plaster that laid bare the wounds beneath.

We’d been skulking in Eltevedtem for nearly three days now, and Brasil had used the time as well as the limited battlefield medical gear we had would allow. The flesh beneath Tres’s plaster was a black and purple swollen mess, punched through and torn by the swoopcopter’s machine gun fire, but the wounds had been cleaned and dusted. Blue and red tags marched down the damaged portions, marking the points at which Brasil had inserted rapid regrowth bios. A flex-alloy boot cushioned the bottom end of the cast against outside impact, but walking on it would have required more painkillers than Tres seemed prepared to take.

“You should be lying down,” I said as she joined me.

“Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.”

“Alright.” I went back to staring into the water. “Any word yet?”

She shook her head. “Oshima’s awake, though. Asking for you.”

I lost focus on the fish below me for a moment. Got it back. Made no move to leave the rail or look up again.

“Oshima or Makita?”

“Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?”

I nodded greyly. “So she still thinks she’s—”

“At the moment, yes.”

I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.

“Kovacs.”

I looked back at Tres impatiently. “Yeah, what?”

“Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.”

“No. It isn’t.”

Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.

“Hello there Micky Serendipity.”

“Hello.”

“I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.” She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine here.”

She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.

“I understand we may have to move soon,” she said quietly. “On foot.”

“Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.”

“Ah—so that much remains the same.”

“The orbitals?” I nodded. “Yeah, they still run at the same parameters as when you—”

I stopped. Gestured. “As they always did.”

Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly

“Tell me,” she said finally. “How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.”

I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.

“Please. I need to know.”

“About three hundred years, local.” I gestured again. “Three hundred and twenty, near enough.”

I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.

“So long,” she murmured.

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.

Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight.

Some things leave the same teethmarks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.

Or not, I reminded myself.

Go easy on her.

“You didn’t know?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.”

“Who told you?”

“I—” She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.

“Three hundred and twenty years,” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.

“I called you,” she said suddenly.

“Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?”

The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.

“I don’t know. I knew.” She cleared her throat. “No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.”

I leaned forward in the seat. “Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?”

“In here, somewhere. In here.”

The woman in the bunk closed her eyes. For a minute or so I thought she’d gone to sleep. I would have left the cabin, gone back up on deck, but there was nothing up there I wanted. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open again and she nodded as if something had just been confirmed in her ear.

“There’s a.” She swallowed. “A space down there. Like a pre-millennial prison. Rows of cells. Walkways and corridors. There are things down there she says she caught, like catching bottleback from a charter yacht. Or maybe caught like a disease? It’s, it shades together. Does that make any sense?”

I thought about the command software. I remembered Sylvie Oshima’s words on the crossing to Drava.

—mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. There’s stuffbedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.

I nodded. Wondered what it might take to break out of that kind of prison. What kind of person—or thing—you might have to be.

Ghosts of things.

“Yeah, it makes sense.” And then, before I could stop myself. “So is that where you come in, Nadia? You something she caught?”

A brief look of horror flitted across the gaunt features.

“Grigori,” she whispered. “There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.”

“Grigori who?”

“Grigori Ishii.” It was still a whisper. Then the inward-looking horror was gone, wiped away, and she was staring hard at me. “You don’t think I’m real, do you, Micky Serendipity?”

A flicker of unease in the back of my head. The name Grigori Ishii chimed somewhere in the pre-Envoy depths of my memory. I stared back at the woman in the bed.

Go easy on her.

Fuck that.

I stood up. “I don’t know what you are. But I’ll tell you this for nothing, you’re not Nadia Makita. Nadia Makita is dead.”

“Yes,” she said thinly. “I’d rather gathered that. But evidently she was backed up and stored before she died, because here I am.”

I shook my head.

“No, you’re not. You’re not here at all in any guaranteed sense. Nadia Makita is gone, vaporised. And there’s no evidence that a copy was made. No technical explanation for how a copy could have got into Sylvie Oshima’s command software, even if it did exist. In fact, no evidence that you’re anything other than a faked personality casing.”

“I think that’s enough, Tak.” Brasil stepped suddenly into the cabin. His face wasn’t friendly. “We can leave it here.”

I swung on him, skinning teeth in a tight grin. “That’s your considered medical opinion is it, Jack? Or just a Quellist revolutionary tenet? Truth in small and controlled doses. Nothing the patient won’t be able to handle.”

“No, Tak,” he said quietly. “It’s a warning. Time for you to come out of the water.”

My hands flexed gently.

“Don’t try me, Jack.”

“You’re not the only one with neurachem, Tak.”

The moment hung, then pivoted and died as the ridiculous dynamics of it caught up with me. Sierra Tres was right. It wasn’t this fractured woman’s fault Isa was dead, and nor was it Brasil’s. And besides, any damage I’d wanted to do to the ghost of Nadia Makita was now done. I nodded and dropped the combat tension like a coat. I brushed past Brasil and reached the door behind him. Turned briefly back to the woman in the bunk.

“Whatever you are, I want Sylvie Oshima back unharmed.” I jerked my head at Brasil. “I brought you these new friends you’ve got, but I’m not one of them. If I think you’ve done anything to damage Oshima, I’ll go through them all like angelfire just to get to you. You keep that in mind.”

She looked steadily back at me.

“Thank you,” she said without apparent irony. “I will.”

On deck, I found Sierra Tres propped in a steel frame chair, scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars. I came and stood behind her, cranking up the neurachem as I peered out in the same direction. It was a limited view—Boubin Islander was tucked away in the shade of a massive, jagged fragment of toppled Martian architecture that had hit the shoal below us, bedded there and fossilised into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogues, and now the view out from under the ruin was obscured by ropes of hanging foliage.

“See anything?”

“I think they’ve put up microlights.” Tres put aside the binoculars. “It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.”

“Still twitchy, then.”

“Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.”

“Well.” I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. “Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?”

“You don’t think he made four hundred metres either then?”

“I don’t know.” I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. “He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defences. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred metres off the water when it took them all out.”

She shot me an amused look. “I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.”

“Oh. Sorry. You seem older.”

“Thank you.”

“In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.”

“Or we got lucky.”

“Or we got lucky,” I echoed.

Brasil came up the companionway and stalked towards us. There was an uncharacteristic anger flickering around in the way he moved and he looked at me with open dislike. I spared him a return glance, then went back to staring at the water.

“I won’t have you talking to her like that again,” he told me.

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’m serious, Kovacs. We all know you’ve got a problem with political commitment, but I’m not going to let you vomit up whatever fucked-in-the-head rage you’re carrying all over this woman.”

I swung on him.

“This woman? This woman? You’re calling me fucked in the head. This woman you’re talking about is not a human being. She’s a fragment, a ghost at best.”

“We don’t know that yet,” said Tres quietly.

“Oh please. Can neither of you see what’s happening here? You’re projecting your desires onto a fucking digitised human sketch. Already. Is this what’s going to happen if we get her back to Kossuth? Are we going to build a whole fucking revolutionary movement on a mythological scrap?”

Brasil shook his head. “The movement’s already there. It doesn’t need to be built, it’s ready to happen.”

“Yeah, all it needs is a figurehead.” I turned away as the old weariness rose in me, stronger even than the anger. “Which is handy, because all you’ve got is a fucking figurehead.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, you’re right.” I began to walk away. There isn’t far you can go on a thirty-metre boat, but I was going to open up as much space as I could between myself and these sudden idiots. Then something made me swing about to face them both across the deck. My voice rose in abrupt fury. “I don’t know that. I don’t know that Nadia Makita’s whole personality wasn’t stored and then left lying around in New Hok like some unexploded shell nobody wanted. I don’t know that it didn’t somehow find a way to get uploaded into a passing deCom. But what are the fucking chances?”

“We can’t make that judgment yet,” Brasil said, coming after me. “We need to get her to Koi.”

“Koi?” I laughed savagely. “Oh, that’s good. Fucking Koi. Jack, do you really think you’re ever going to see Koi again? Koi is more than likely blasted meat scraped up off some back street in Millsport. Or better yet, he’s an interrogation guest of Aiura Harlan. Don’t you get it, Jack? It is over. Your neoQuellist resurgence is rucked. Koi is gone, probably the others are too. Just more rucking casualties on the glorious road to revolutionary change.”

“Kovacs, you think I don’t feel for what happened to Isa?”

“I think, jack, that provided we rescued that shell of a myth we’ve got down there, you don’t much care who died or how.”

Sierra Tres moved awkwardly on the rail. “Isa chose to get involved. She knew the risks. She took the pay. She was a free agent.”

“She was fifteen fucking years old!”

Neither of them said anything. They just watched me. The slap of water on the hull grew audible. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath and looked at them again. I nodded.

“It’s okay,” I said tiredly. “I see where this is going. I’ve seen it before, I saw it on Sanction IV. Fucking Joshua Kemp said it at Indigo City. What we crave is the revolutionary momentum. How I’ve get it is almost irrelevant, and certainly not admitting of ethical debate—historical outcome will be the final moral arbiter. If that isn’t Quellcrist Falconer down there, you’re going to turn it into her anyway. Aren’t you.”

The two surfers traded a look. I nodded again.

“Yeah. And where does that leave Sylvie Oshima? She didn’t choose this. She wasn’t a free agent. She was a fucking innocent bystander. And she’ll be just the first of many if you get what you want.”

More silence. Finally, Brasil shrugged.

“So why did you come to us in the first place?”

“Because I rucking misjudged you, Jack. Because I remembered you all as better than this sad wish-fulfillment shit.”

Another shrug. “Then you remember wrong.”

“So it seems.”

“I think you came to us out of lack of options,” said Sierra Tres soberly.

“And you must have known that we would value the potential existence of Nadia Makita above the host personality.”

“Host?”

“No one wants to harm Oshima unnecessarily. But if a sacrifice is necessary, and this is Makita—”

“But it isn’t. Open your fucking eyes, Sierra.”

“Maybe not. But let’s be brutally honest, Kovacs. If this is Makita, then she’s worth a lot more to the people of Harlan’s World than some mercenary deCom bounty hunter you happen to have taken a shine to.”

I felt a cold, destructive ease stealing up through me as I looked at Tres.

It felt almost comfortable, like homecoming.

“Maybe she’s worth a lot more than some crippled neoQuellist surf bunny too. Did that ever occur to you? Prepared to make that sacrifice, are you?”

She looked down at her leg, then back at me.

“Of course I am,” she said gently, as if explaining to a child. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

An hour later, the covert channel broke open into sudden, excited transmission.

Detail was confused but the gist was jubilantly clear. Soseki Koi and a small group of survivors had fought their way clear of the Mitzi Harlan debacle. The escape routing out of Millsport had held up.

They were ready to come and get us.

THIRTY-FIVE

As we steered into the village harbour and I looked around me, the sense of déjá vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.

I could almost see myself.

Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.

It didn’t. But it was the same loosely-gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline and the same working harbour complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big ocean-going rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances.

Men did not.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.

We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago, Boubin Islander’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in to any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags and headed up the main street. It was a slow process—Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up too.

No one spoke to us.

We found the village’s only hotel, overlooking the main square, and booked rooms for a week, using two pristine ID datachips from among the selection we’d brought with us from Vchira. As women, Tres and Makita were our charges and didn’t rate ID procedure of their own. A scarfed and robed receptionist nonetheless greeted them with a warmth that, when I explained that my aged aunt had suffered a hip injury, became solicitous enough to be a problem. I snapped down an offer of a visit from the local woman’s doctor, and the receptionist retreated before the display of male authority. Lips tight, she busied herself with running our ID. From the window beside her desk, you could look down into the square and see the raised platform and fixing points for the community’s punishment chair. I stared bleakly down at it for a moment, then locked myself back into the present. We handprinted for access on an antique scanner and went up to our rooms.

“You have something against these people?” Makita asked me, stripping off her head garb in the room. “You seem angry. Is this why you’re pursuing a vendetta against their priests?”

“It’s related.”

“I see.” She shook out her hair, pushed fingers up through it and regarded the cloth-and-metal masking system in her other hand with a quizzical curiosity at odds with the blunt distaste Sylvie Oshima had shown when forced to wear a scarf in Tekitomura. “Why under three moons would anybody choose to wear something like this?”

I shrugged. “It’s not the most stupid thing I’ve seen human beings commit themselves to.”

She eyed me keenly. “Is that an oblique criticism?”

“No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.”

She matched my shrug. “Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.”

I drew a hard breath.

“Assume what you want. I’m going out.”

Down at the commercial end of the harbour, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl offish ramen, carried it to a window seat and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-aged local wandered across to my table with his tray.

“Mind if I sit here? It’s kind of crowded.”

I glanced around the ‘fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.

“Suit yourself.”

“Thanks.” He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence, then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.

“Not from around here then?”

I felt a light tautening across my nerves. “Makes you say that?”

“Ah, see.” He grinned again. “If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.”

“Good for you.”

“Not off that rayhunter though, are you?”

I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. “What are you, a detective?”

“No!” He laughed delightedly. “What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t any more.”

“So why’d you stay?”

“Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.”

The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.

I made my voice work. “Really?”

“Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.” He pulled a wry face. “Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.”

“What about your parents? See much of them?”

“No, they’re dead.” His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.

I sat and watched him carefully.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.

“Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.” He drew breath as if it hurt him. “It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.”

“Did they get the guy?”

“No.” Another painfully hitched breath. “No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.”

I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbour complex. I thought about giving him his chance.

“No money for re-sleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?”

He gave me a hard look. “You know we don’t do that.”

“Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.”

“Yeah, but.” He hesitated. Glanced around the ‘fab, then back to me. His voice lowered. “Look, I came up with the Revelation. I don’t hold with everything the priests say, especially these days. But it’s a faith, it’s a way of life. Gives you something to hold onto, something to bring up your kids with.”

“You got sons or daughters?”

“Two daughters, three sons.” He sighed. “Yeah, I know. All that shit. You know, down past the point we’ve got a bathing beach. Most of the villages have got them, I remember when I was a kid we used to spend the whole summer in the water, all of us together. Parents would come down after work sometimes. Now, since things got serious, they’ve built a wall right into the sea there. If you go for the day, they’ve got officiators watching the whole time, and the women have to go in on the other side of the wall.

So I can’t even enjoy a swim with my own wife and daughters. It’s fucking stupid, I know. Too extreme. But what are you going to do? We don’t have the money to move to Millsport, and I wouldn’t want my kids running around the streets down there anyway. I saw what it was like when I studied there. It’s a city full of fucking degenerates. No heart left in it, just mindless filth. At least the people around here still believe in something more than gratifying every animal desire whenever they feel like it. You know what, I wouldn’t want to live another life in another body, if that was all I was going to do with it.”

“Well, lucky you don’t have the money for a re-sleeve then. It’d be a shame to get tempted, wouldn’t it.”

Shame to see your parents again, I didn’t add.

“That’s right,” he said, apparently oblivious to the irony. “That’s the point. Once you understand you’ve only got the one life, you try so much harder to do things right. You forget about all that material stuff, all that decadence. You worry about this life, not what you might be able to do in your next body. You focus on what matters. Family. Community. Friendship.”

“And, of course, Observance.” The mildness in my voice was oddly unfaked. We needed to keep a low profile for the next few hours, but it wasn’t that. I reached curiously inside me and I found I’d lost my grip on the customary contempt I summoned into situations like this. I looked across the table at him, and all I felt was tired. He hadn’t let Sarah and her daughter die for good, he maybe hadn’t even been born when it happened.

Maybe, given the same situation, he’d take the same bleating-sheep option his parents had, but right now I couldn’t make that matter. I couldn’t hate him enough to take him into that alley, tell him the truth about who I was and give him his chance.

“That’s right, Observance.” His face lit up. “That’s the key, that’s what underwrites all the rest. See, science has betrayed us here, it’s got out of hand, got so we don’t control it any more. It’s made things too easy. Not ageing naturally, not having to die and account for ourselves before our Maker, that’s blinded us to the real values. We spend our whole lives scraping away trying to find the money for re-sleeving, and we waste the real time we have to live this life right. If people would only—”

“Hey, Mikulas.” I glanced up. Another man about the same age as my new companion was striding towards us, behind the cheerful yell. “You finished bending that poor guy’s ear or what? We’ve got hull to scrape, man.”

“Yeah, just coming.”

“Ignore him,” said the newcomer with a wide grin. “Likes to think he knows everyone, and if your face doesn’t fit the list, he has to damn well find out who you are. Bet he’s done that already, right?”

I smiled. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Knew it. I’m Toyo.” A thick, extended hand. “Welcome to Kuraminato. Maybe see you around town if you’re staying long.”

“Yeah, thanks. That’d be good.”

“Meantime, we’ve got to go. Nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” agreed Mikulas, getting to his feet. “Nice talking to you. You should think about what I was saying.”

“Maybe I will.” A final twist of caution made me stop him as he was turning away. “Tell me something. How come you knew I wasn’t off the rayhunter?”

“Oh, that. Well, you were watching them like you were interested in what they were doing. No one watches their own ship in dock that closely. I was right, huh?”

“Yeah. Good call.” The tiny increment of relief soaked through me.

“Maybe you should be a detective after all. New line for work for you. Doing the right thing. Catching bad guys.”

“Hey, it’s a thought.”

“Nah, he’d be way too nice to them once he’d caught them. Soft as shit, he is. Can’t even discipline his own wife.”

General laughter as they left. I joined in. Let it fade slowly out to a smile, and then nothing but the small relief inside.

I really wouldn’t have to follow him and kill him.

I gave it half an hour, then wandered out of the ‘fab and onto the wharf.

There were still figures on the decks and superstructure of the rayhunter.

I stood and watched for a few minutes, and finally a crewmember came down the forward gangplank towards me. His face wasn’t friendly.

“Something I can do for you?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Sing the hymn of dreams gone down from Alabardos’ sky. I’m Kovacs. The others are at the hotel. Tell your skipper. We’ll move as soon as it’s dark.”

THIRTY-SIX

The rayhunter Angelfire Flirt, like most vessels of its type, cut a mean and rakish figure at sea. Part warship, part oversized racing skiff, combining a razor sharp real-keel centre of gravity and ludicrous quantities of grav lift in twin outrigger pods, it was built above all for reckless speed and piracy. Elephant rays and their smaller relatives are swift in the water, but more importantly their flesh tends to spoil if left untreated for any length of time. Freeze the bodies and you can sell the meat well enough, but get it back fast enough to the big fresh-catch auctions in centres of affluence like Millsport, and you can make a real killing. For that you need a fast boat. Shipyards all over Harlan’s World understand this and build accordingly. Tacitly understood in the same yards is the fact that some of the best elephant ray stock lives and breeds in waters set aside for the exclusive use of the First Families. Poaching there is a serious offence, and if you’re going to get away with it your fast boat also needs to present a low, hard-to-spot profile both visually and on radar.

If you’re going to run from Harlan’s World law enforcement, there are worse ways to do it than aboard a rayhunter.

On the second day out, secure in the knowledge we were so far from the Millsport Archipelago that no aircraft had the range to overfly us, I went up on deck and stood on the left-hand outrigger gantry, watching the ocean rip past underneath me. Spray on the wind, and the sense of events rushing towards me too fast to assimilate. The past and its cargo of dead, falling behind in our wake, taking with them options and solutions it was too late to try.

Envoys are supposed to be good at this shit.

Out of nowhere, I saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin new face. But this time there was no voice in my head, no instilled trainer confidence. I wasn’t getting any more help from that particular ghost, it seemed.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

It was called out, over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, towards the centre deck and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver grey hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.

Another fucking ghost.

“Sure. Why not?”

She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream.

Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.

“You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?”

Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d got wrecked on take with a virtual whore in a—failed—attempt to break the system’s desire fulfillment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d got equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.

“Don’t read anything into it,” I told her. “I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”

She hesitated. “I’m remembering a lot of detail.”

I watched the sea. Said nothing.

“We fucked, didn’t we?”

The ocean, pouring past beneath me. “Yeah. A couple of times.”

“I remember—” Another hovering pause. She looked away from me.

“You held me. While I was sleeping.”

“Yes.” I made an impatient gesture. “This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?”

“It’s. Difficult.” She shivered. “There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.”

Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing, I felt like saying. It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.

“Do you remember someone called Plex?” I asked her instead.

“Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.”

“What do you remember about him?”

The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.

“That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.”

“Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

I shrugged. “Just putting you straight on the facts.”

“Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.”

I looked sideways at her. “You been talking to the others?”

“They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.”

I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. “I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction IV.”

“Yes, they said. ”

“Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalisation. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”

“I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?”

“Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.”

“You talk as if I had a choice.”

I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. “You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you. What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?”

The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. “Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?”

“Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.”

“Yes, well right now that’s not possible,” she snapped. “Is it?”

I stared back at her. “I don’t know. Is it?”

“You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.” She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. “I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic. She’s the one who sent me back up when you came for us.”

“Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come on!”

“No. She is grieving.”

That stopped me. “Grieving what?”

“What do you think? The fact that every member of her team died in Drava.”

“That’s crabshit. She wasn’t in contact with them when they died. The net was down.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” The woman in front of me drew a deep breath. Her voice lowered and paced out to explanatory calm. “The net was down, she couldn’t access it. She has told me this. But the receiving system stored every moment of their dying, and if she opens the wrong doors down there, it all comes screaming out. She’s in shock from the exposure to it. She knows that, and as long as it lasts she’s staying where it’s safe.”

“She told you that?”

We were eye to eye, a scant half metre of seawind between us. “Yes, she told me that.”

“I don’t fucking believe you.”

She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged.

“What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off! You’re going to hand me that tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?”

“No, it wasn’t.” For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. “None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?”

“Then,” I said evenly. “You should have planned it better.”

“Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.”

Silence.

I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and Angelfire Flirt flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost-aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.

But not about this conversation.

That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.

“Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking funny,” the woman at my side said sourly.

I shook my head. “Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshippers.”

“Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.”

“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”

She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:

Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily-blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer real death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.

“So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,” I said after a while. “This weapon you sold the yakuza.”

She twitched. Didn’t look at me. “You know about that, huh?”

“I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?”

She stared down at the water for a while.

“It’s taking a lot for granted,” she said slowly. “Thinking I should trust you with this.”

“Why? Is it reversible?”

She grew very still.

“I don’t think so.” I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. “I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.”

“So what is it?”

Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.

“It’s a genetic weapon,” she said clearly. “In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones that survived, would pass it on to their children and those children would pass it on to theirs.”

“Nice.”

“It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?”

“Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.”

“Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?”

I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.

“Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,” I said flatly.

The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. “I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal make-up that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality—in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything to hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.”

“Genetically encoded insurgency.” I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm, descending. “Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great grandchildren and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?”

“I don’t know.” She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had lent her. “Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I … After it ended. Maybe no one was left.”

I nodded again. “Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.”

She shot me a weary look.

“It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporised because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns levelled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed in their hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor.”

“You’re talking about conditions that haven’t existed for three hundred years,” I said mildly. “But that’s not the point. It’s not the Harlan family I feel bad about. It’s the poor fucks whose Black Brigade ancestors decided their political commitment at a cellular level generations before they were even born. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about who I murder and why.” I held back a moment, then drove the blade home anyway. “And so, from what I’ve read, did Quellcrist Falconer.”

A kilometre of white-capped blue whipped past beneath us. Barely audible, the grav drive in the left-hand pod murmured to itself.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she whispered at last.

I shrugged. “You triggered this thing.”

“It was a Quellist weapon.” I thought I could hear an edge of desperation in her words. “It was all I had to work with. You think it’s worse than a conscript army? Worse than the clone-enhanced combat sleeves the Protectorate decants its soldiers into so they’ll kill without empathy or regret?”

“No. But I think as a concept it contradicts the words I will not ask you to fight, to live or to die for a cause you have not first understood and embraced of your own free will.”

“I know that!” Now it was clearly audible, a jagged flawline running through her voice. “Don’t you think I know that? But what choice did I have? I was alone. Hallucinating half the time, dreaming Oshima’s life and…” She shivered. “Other things. I was never sure when I’d next wake up and what I’d find around me when I did, not sure sometimes if I’d wake up again. I didn’t know how much time I had, sometimes, I didn’t even know if I was real. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

I shook my head. Envoy deployments had put me through a variety of nightmarish experiences, but you never doubt at any moment that it’s absolutely real. The conditioning won’t let you.

Her hands were tight on the gantry rail again, knuckles whitening. She was looking out at the ocean, but I don’t think she could see it.

“Why go back to war with the Harlan family?” I asked her gently.

She jerked a glance at me. “You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into Settlement-Years poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away.”

“Yeah, this enemy you cannot kill. I read that speech back when I was a kid. The strange thing is, for someone who’s only been awake for a few weeks on and off, you’re remarkably well informed.”

“That’s not what it’s like,” she said, eyes on the hurrying sea again. “The first time I woke up for real, I’d already been dreaming Oshima for months. It was like being in a hospital bed, paralysed, watching someone you think might be your doctor on a badly-tuned monitor. I didn’t understand who she was, only that she was important to me. Half the time, I knew what she knew. Sometimes, it felt like I was floating up inside her. Like I could put my mouth on hers and speak through her.”

She wasn’t, I realised, talking to me any more, the words were just coming up out of her like lava, relieving a pressure inside whose form I could only make guesses at.

“The first time I woke up for real, I thought I’d die from the shock. I was dreaming she was dreaming, something about a guy she’d slept with when she was younger. I opened my eyes on a bed in some shithole Tek’to flophouse and I could move. I had a hangover, but I was alive. I knew where I was, the street and the name of the place, but I didn’t know who I was. I went outside, I walked down to the waterfront in the sun and people were looking at me and I realised I was crying.”

“What about the others? Orr and the rest of the team?”

She shook her head. “No, I’d left them somewhere at the other end of town. She’d left them, but I think I had something to do with it. I think she could feel me coming up and she went away to be alone while it happened. Or maybe I made her do it. I don’t know.”

A shudder ran through her.

“When I talked to her. Down there in the cells, when I told her that, she called it seepage. I asked her if she lets me through sometimes, and she wouldn’t tell me. I know certain things unlock the bulkheads. Sex. Grief. Rage. But sometimes I just swim up for no reason and she gives me control.” She paused, shook her head again. “Maybe we’re just negotiating.”

I nodded. “Which of you made the connection with Plex?”

“I don’t know.” She was looking at her hands, flexing and unflexing them like some mechanical system she hadn’t got the hang of yet. “I don’t remember. I think, yeah, it was her, I think she knew him already. Peripherally, part of the crimescape. Tek’to’s a small pond, and the deComs are always at the fringes of legal. Cheap black-market deCom gear’s a part of what Plex does up there. Don’t think they ever did business, but she knew his face, knew what he was. I dug him out of her memory when I knew I was going to activate the Qualgrist system.”

“Do you remember Tanaseda?”

She nodded, more controlled now. “Yeah. High-level yak patriarch. They brought him in behind Yukio, when Plex told them the preliminary codes checked out. Yukio didn’t have enough seniority to swing what they needed.”

“And what was that?”

A repeat of the searching gaze she’d fired at me when I first mentioned the weapon. I spread my arms in the whipping wind.

“Come on, Nadia. I brought you a revolutionary army. I climbed Rila Crags to get you out. That’s got to buy something, right?”

Her gaze flinched away again. I waited.

“It’s viral,” she said finally. “High contagion, symptomless flu variant. Everyone catches it, everyone passes it on, but only the genetically modified react. It triggers a shift in the way their hormonal system responds to a match with Harlan pheromones. The carrier sleeves were buried in sealed storage at covert sites. In the event that they were to be triggered, an assigned group would dig up the storage facility, sleeve into one of the bodies and go walkabout. The virus would do the rest.”

Sleeve into one of the bodies. The words ticked in my head, like water trickling into a crack. The Envoy harbinger of understanding hovered just out of reach. Interlocking mechanisms of intuition spun tiny wheels in the build-up to knowledge.

“These sites. Where were they?”

She shrugged. “Mainly in New Hokkaido, but there were some on the north end of the Saffron Archipelago too.”

“And you took Tanaseda to?”

“Sanshin Point.”

The mechanism locked solid, and doors opened. Recollection and understanding poured through the gap like morning light. Lazlo and Sylvie bickering as the Guns for Guevara slid into dock at Drava.

Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—

I did hear that one. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.

And my own conversation with Plex in Tokyo Crow the morning before. So how come they needed your de- and re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.

Some kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.

Organised crime, huh.

“Something amusing you, Kovacs?”

I shook my head. “Micky Serendipity. Think I’m going to have to keep that name.”

She gave me an odd look. I sighed.

“Doesn’t matter. So what was Tanaseda’s end of this? What does he get out of a weapon like that?”

Her mouth crimped in one corner. Her eyes seemed to glitter in the light reflecting off the waves. “A criminal is a criminal, no matter what their political class. In the end, Tanaseda’s no different to some cut-rate wharf thug from Karlovy. And what have the yakuza always been good at?

Blackmail. Influence. Leverage to get government concessions. Blind eyes turned to the right activities, shares in the right ongoing state enterprises. Collaboration at repression for a price. All very genteel.”

“But you suckered them.”

She nodded bleakly. “I showed them the site, gave them the codes. Told them the virus transmitted sexually, so they’d think they had control. It does that too, in fact, and Plex was too sloppy with the biocodes to dig any deeper than he did. I knew I could trust him to screw up to that extent.”

I felt another faint smile flicker across my own face. “Yeah, he has a talent for that. Must be the aristo lineage.”

“Must be.”

“And with the grip the yakuza have on the sex industry in Millsport, you called it just right.” The intrinsic joy of the scam sank into me like a shiver rush—there was a smooth, machined Tightness to it worthy of Envoy planning. “You gave them a threat to hold over the Harlanites that they already had the perfect delivery system for.”

“Yes, so it seems.” Her voice was blurring again as she dropped away into her memories. “They were going to sleeve some yak soldier or other in one of the Sanshin bodies and take it to Millsport to demonstrate what they had. I don’t know if he ever got that far.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. The yakuza are pretty meticulous about their leverage schemes. Man, I’d have given a lot to see Tanaseda’s face when he showed up at Rila with that package and the Harlan gene specialists told him what he’d really got on his hands. I’m surprised Aiura didn’t have him executed on the spot. Shows remarkable restraint.”

“Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it. By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.” She shrugged. “You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.”

“Yeah.”

Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked round at me again and her face was miserable with contained anger.

“Alright, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?”

I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’re right, I wasn’t there.”

And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.

Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.

THIRTY-SEVEN

In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.

Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.

I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.

“Tres?” he asked us quietly.

Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. “Still mending. We left her with. With Her.”

“Right. Good.”

The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.

“We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?”

Koi shook his head. “Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.”

“Mari Ado?”

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all—they traded gruff arm’s-length grippings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off towards the harbour master’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.

“They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances.

Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.”

I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniperfire.

“Can we trust these people?”

Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. “The very large majority, yes. Pictures is Drava-built, most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original co-operative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.”

“Yeah? Sounds a little Utopian to me. What about casual crew?”

Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. “Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for. Pictures has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.”

Brasil cleared his throat. “How many of them know what’s going on?”

“Know that we’re here? About a dozen. Know why we’re here? Two, both ex-Black Brigade.” Koi looked up at the rayhunter, searchingly.

“They’ll both want to be there for Ascertainment. We’ve got a safe house set up in the stern lowers where we can do it.”

“Koi,” I slotted myself into his field of vision. “We need to talk first. There are a couple of things you should know.”

He regarded me for a long moment, lined face unreadable. But there was a hunger in his eyes that I knew I wasn’t going to get past.

“It’ll have to wait,” he told me. “Our primary concern here is to confirm her identity. I’d appreciate it if none of you call me by name until that’s done.”

“Ascertain,” I said sharply. The audible capitalisation of her was starting to piss me off. “You mean ascertain, right Koi?”

His gaze skipped off my shoulder and back to the rayhunter’s side.

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” he said.

A lot has been made of Quellism’s underclass roots, particularly over the centuries since its principal architect died and passed conveniently beyond the realm of political debate. The fact that Quellcrist Falconer chose to build a powerbase among the poorest of Harlan’s World’s labour force has led to a curious conviction among a lot of neoQuellists that the intention during the Unsettlement was to create a leadership drawn exclusively from this base. That Nadia Makita was herself the product of a relatively privileged middle class background goes carefully unremarked, and since she never rose to a position of political governance, the central issue of who’s going to run things after all this blows over never had to be faced. But the intrinsic contradiction at the heart of modern Quellist thought remains, and in neoQuellist company it’s not considered polite to draw attention to it.

So I didn’t remark on the fact that the safe house in the stern lowers of Pictures of the Floating World clearly didn’t belong to the elegantly spoken ex-Black Brigade man and woman who were waiting in it for us. Stern lowers is the cheapest, harshest neighbourhood on any urbraft or sea factory and no one who has a choice about it chooses to live there. I could feel the vibration from Floating World’s drives intensifying as we took a companionway down from the more desirable crew residences at superstructure levels over the stern, and by the time we got inside the apartment it was a constant background grind. Utilitarian furniture, scuffed and scraped walls and a minimum of decoration made it clear that whoever did quarter here didn’t spend much time at home.

“Forgive the surroundings,” said the woman urbanely, as she let us into the apartment. “It will only be for the night. And our proximity to the drives makes surveillance a near impossibility.”

Her partner ushered us to chairs set around a cheap plastic table laid with refreshments. Tea in a heated pot, assorted sushi. Very formal. He talked as he got us seated.

“Yeah, we’re also less than a hundred metres from the nearest hull maintenance hatch, which is where you’ll all be collected from tomorrow morning. They’ll drive the skimmer right in under the load-bearing girders between keels six and seven. You can climb straight down.” He gestured at Sierra Tres. “Even injured, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

There was a rehearsed competence to it all, but as he talked, his gaze kept creeping towards the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s body, then skidding abruptly away. Koi had been doing much the same thing since we brought her off the Angelfire Flirt. Only the female Brigade member seemed to have her eyes and hopes under real control.

“So,” she said smoothly. “I’m Sto Delia. This is Kiyoshi Tan. Shall we begin?”

Ascertainment.

In today’s society, it’s as common a ritual as parental acknowledgement parties to celebrate a birth, or reweddings to cement newly re-sleeved couples in their old relationship. Part stylised ceremony, part maudlin what about that time when session, Ascertainment varies in its form and formality from world to world and culture to culture. But on every planet I’ve ever been, it exists as a deeply respected underlying aspect of social relations. Outside of expensive hi-tech psychographic procedures, it’s the only way we have to prove to our friends and family that, regardless of what flesh we may be wearing, we are who we say we are. Ascertainment is the core social function that defines ongoing identity in the modern age, as vital to us now as primitive functions like signature and fingerprint databasing were to our pre-millennial ancestors.

And that’s where an ordinary citizen is concerned.

For semi-mythical heroic figures, back—perhaps—from the dead, it’s a hundred times more meaningful again. Soseki Koi was trembling visibly as he took his seat. His colleagues were both wearing younger sleeves and they showed it less, but if you looked with Envoy eyes, the same tension was there in unconfident, overdone gestures, laughter too readily coughed out, the occasional tremor in a voice as it started up again in a dried throat.

These men and this woman, who had once belonged to the most feared counter-insurgency force in planetary history, had suddenly been granted a glimpse of hope among the ashes of their past. They faced the woman who claimed to be Nadia Makita with everything that had ever mattered to them hanging clearly visible in the balance behind their eyes.

“It is an honour,” Koi began, and then stopped to clear his throat. “It is an honour to speak of these things …”

Across the table, the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve looked back at him steadily as he spoke. She answered one of his oblique questions with crisp assent, ignored another. The other two Brigade members weighed in, and she turned slightly in her seat towards each of them, offered an antique gesture of inclusion each time. I felt myself receding to the status of spectator as the initial round of pleasantries peeled away and the Ascertainment gathered momentum. The conversation picked up, moved rapidly from matters of the last few days across a long and sombre political retrospective, and then into talk of the Unsettlement and the years that preceded it. The language shifted just as rapidly, from contemporary Amanglic into an unfamiliar old-time Japanese dialect with occasional gusts of Stripjap. I glanced across at Brasil and shrugged as subject matter and syntax both accelerated away from us.

It went on for hours. The labouring motors of the urbraft made dim thunder in the walls around us. Pictures of the Floating World ploughed on its way. We sat and listened.

“…makes you think. A fall from any of those ledges and you’re offal splattered across »the outgoing tide?«. No recovery scheme, no re-sleeve policy, not even family death benefits. It’s a »rage?« that starts in your bones and …”

“…remember when you first realised that was the case?”

“…one of my father’s articles on colonial theory …”

“…playing »?????« on the streets of Danchi. We all did. I remember one time the »streetpolice?« tried to …”

“…reaction?”

“Family are like that—or at least my family were always »?????ing« in a slictopus »plague?« …”

“…even when you were young, right?”

“I wrote that stuff when I was barely out of my teens. Can’t believe they printed it. Can’t believe there were people who »paid good money for/devoted seriousness to?« so much »?????«‘

“But—”

“Is it?” A shrug. “Didn’t feel that way when I »looked back/reconsidered?« from the »blood on my hands?« basis in the »?????«.”

From time to time Brasil or I would rise and make fresh tea in the kitchen. The Black Brigade veterans barely noticed. They were locked on, lost in the wash and detail of a past made suddenly real again just across the table.

“…recall whose decision that was?”

“Obviously not—you guys didn’t have a »chain of command/respect?« worth a fucking …”

Sudden, explosive laughter around the table. But you could see the tear sheen on their eyes.

“…and it was getting too cold for a stealth campaign up there. Infrared would have shown us up like …”

“Yes, it was almost …”

“…Millsport

“…better to lie to them that we had a good chance? I don’t think so.”

“Would have been a hundred fucking kilometres before …”

“…and supplies.”

“…Odisej, as far as I remember. He would have run a »?????« standoff right up to the …”

“…about Alabardos?”

Long pause.

“It’s not clear, it feels »?????«. I remember something about a helicopter? We were going to the helicopter?”

She was trembling slightly. Not for the first time, they sheared away from the subject matter like ripwings from a rifleshot.

“…something about …”

“…essentially a reactive theory …”

“No, probably not. If I examined other »models?« …”

“But isn’t it axiomatic that »the struggle?« for control of »?????« would cause …”

“Is it? Who says that?”

“Well.” An embarrassed hesitation, glances exchanged. “You did. At least, you »argued?/admitted?« that …”

“That’s crabshit! I never said convulsive policy shift was the »key?« to a better …”

“But, Spaventa claims you advocated—”

“Spaventa? That fucking fraud. Is he still breathing?”

“…and your writings on demodynamics show …”

“Look, I’m not a fucking ideologue, alright. We were faced with »a bottleback in the surf?« and we had to …”

“So you’re saying »?????« isn’t the solution to »?????« and reducing »poverty/ignorance?« would mean …”

“Of course it would. I never claimed anything different. What happened to Spaventa, anyway?”

“Umm, well—he teaches at Millsport university these—”

“Does he? The little fuck.”

“Ahem. Perhaps we could discuss a »version?/view?« of those events which pivots less on »?????« than »recoil?/slingshot?« theories of …”

“Very well, as far as it goes. But give me a single »binding example?« to support those claims.”

“Ahhhhhh …”

“Exactly. Demodynamics isn’t »blood in the water?«, it’s an attempt to …”

“But—”

And on and on, until, in a clatter of cheap furniture, Koi was suddenly on his feet.

“That’s enough,” he said gruffly.

Glances flickered back and forth between the rest of us. Koi came round the side of the table and his old face was taut with emotion as he looked down at the woman sitting there. She looked back up at him without expression.

He offered her his hands.

“I have,” he swallowed, “concealed my identity from you until now, for the sake of. Our cause. Our common cause. But I am Soseki Koi, ninth Black Brigade command, Saffron theatre.”

The mask on Sylvie Oshima’s face melted away. Something like a grin took its place.

“Koi? Shaky Koi?”

He nodded. His lips were clamped together.

She took his outstretched hands, and he lifted her to her feet beside him.

He faced the table and looked at each of us in turn. You could see the tears in his eyes, hear them in his voice when he spoke.

“This is Quellcrist Falconer,” he said tightly. “In my mind there is no longer room for doubt.”

Then he turned and flung his arms around her. Sudden tear-ribbons glistened on his cheeks. His voice was hoarse.

“We waited so long for you to come again,” he wept. “We waited so long.”