Woken Furies

THIRTY-EIGHT

I woke to Kossuth-grade heat and low-angle sunlight, a mild hangover and the serrated sound of snarling. Out in the pens, someone was feeding the swamp panthers.

I glanced at my watch. It was very early.

I lay for a while in sheets tangled to my waist, listening to the animals and the harsh male whoops of the feeding crew on the gantries above them. Segesvar had taken me on a tour of the place two years previously, and I still remembered the awful power with which the panthers nailed up to catch chunks of fishsteak the size of a man’s torso. The feeding crew had yelled then as well, but the more you listened the more you realised that it was bravado to shore up courage against an instinctive terror. With the exception of one or two hardened swamp-game hunters, Segesvar recruited pretty exclusively from the wharf fronts and slums of Newpest, where the chances of any of the kids having seen a real panther were about even with them ever having been to Millsport.

A couple of centuries back, it was different—the Expanse was smaller then, not yet cleared all the way south to make way for the belaweed mono-cropping combines. In places, the swamp’s poisonously beautiful trees and float-foliage crept almost up to the city limits, and the inland harbour had to be redredged on a twice-yearly basis. It wasn’t unheard of for panthers to turn up basking on the loading ramps in the summer heat, the chameleon skin of mane and mantle shimmering to mimic the sun’s glare. Peculiar variations in the breeding cycles of their prey out on the Expanse sometimes drove them in to roam the streets closest to the swamplands, where they ripped open sealed refuse canisters with effortless savagery and occasionally, at night, took the homeless or the unwary drunk. Just as they would in their swamp environment, they sprawled prone in back alleys, body and limbs concealed beneath a mane and mantle that would camouflage to black in the darkness. To their victims, they would resemble nothing so much as a pool of deep shadow until it was too late, and they left nothing behind for the police but broad splashes of blood and the echo of screams in the night. By the time I was ten, I’d seen my share of the creatures in the flesh, had even myself once run screaming up a wharf-shed ladder with my friends when a sleepy panther rolled over at our step-freeze-step approach, flapped one corner of its sloppy, tendrilled mane at us and treated us to a gape-beaked yawn.

The terror, like much that you experience in childhood, was transient.

Swamp panthers were scary, they were lethally dangerous if you encountered them under the wrong circumstances, but in the end they were a part of our world.

The snarling outside seemed to reach a crescendo.

To Segesvar’s crew, swamp panthers were the bad guys of a hundred cheap hologames and maybe a school biology class they hadn’t cut, made suddenly real. Monsters from another planet.

This one.

And maybe, inside some of the young thugs who worked for Segesvar until the lower-echelon haiduci lifestyle inevitably took them down, maybe these monsters awoke the shivery existential understanding of exactly how far from home we all really were.

Then again, maybe not.

Someone shifted in the bed beside me and groaned.

“Don’t those fucking things ever shut up?”

Recollection arrived at the same moment as the shock, and they cancelled each other out. I rolled my head sideways and saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin features squashed up under a pillow she’d crushed to her own head. Her eyes were still closed.

“Feeding time,” I said, mouth sticky as I spoke.

“Yeah, well I can’t make up my mind what’s pissing me off more. Them or the fucking idiots feeding them.” She opened her eyes. “Good morning.”

“And to you.” Memory of her the night before, hunched forward astride me. Beneath the sheets, I was hardening with the thought. “I didn’t think this was ever going to happen in the real world.”

She looked back at me for a moment, then rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

“No. Nor did I.”

The events of the previous day floated sluggishly to the surface. My first sight of Vidaura, poised in the snout of Segesvar’s low-profile skimmer as it held station on the roiled waters beneath the urbraft’s massive load bearing supports. The dawn light from the opening at the stern had not reached this deep into the space between hulls and she was little more than a gun-handed, spike-haired silhouette as I came down through the maintenance hatch. There was a reassuring operational toughness to the figure she cut, but when torchglow fell briefly across her face as we boarded, I saw something else there that I couldn’t define. She met my eyes briefly, then looked away.

Nobody spoke much during the skimmer ride across the early morning waters of the Gulf. There was a solid wind out of the west and a cold gunmetal light across everything that didn’t encourage conversation. As we closed on the coast, Segesvar’s contraband driver called us all inside and a second hard-faced young haiduci swung himself up into the skimmer’s gun-turret. We sat in the cramped cabin in silence, listening to the engines change pitch as we slowed on approach to the beach. Vidaura took the seat beside Brasil, and down in the gloom where their thighs touched, I saw them clasp hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back in the comfortless metal and webbing seat, running the route behind my eyes for something to do.

Off the ocean, straight up some shabby, effluent-poisoned beach somewhere at the north end of Vchira, out of sight, but barely, of the Newpest suburb skyline whose shanties supplied the poison by piped outflow. No one stupid enough to come here to swim or fish, no one to see the blunt nosed, heavy-skirted skimmer come brazening through. Across the oil stained mudflats behind, through choked and dying float-foliage and then out onto the Expanse proper. Zigzag through the endless belaweed soup at standard traffic speeds to break the trail, three stops at different baling stations, each with haiduci-connected employees, and a change of heading after each one. Isolation and journey’s end at Segesvar’s home from home, the panther farm.

It took most of the day. I stood on the dock at the last baling station stop and watched the sun go down behind clouds across the Expanse like wrappings of bloodstained gauze. Down on the deck of the skimmer, Brasil and Vidaura talked with quiet intensity. Sierra Tres was still inside, trading haiduci gossip with the vehicle’s two-man crew last time I checked.

Koi was busy elsewhere, making calls. The woman in Oshima’s sleeve wandered round a bale of drying weed as tall as both of us and stopped beside me, following my gaze to the horizon.

“Nice sky.”

I grunted.

“It’s one of the things I remember about Kossuth. Evening skies on the Expanse. Back when I worked the weed harvests in ‘69 and ‘71.” She slid down into a sitting position against the bale and looked at her hands as if examining them for traces of the labour she was describing. “Of course, they kept us working ‘til dark most days, but when the light tipped over like this, you knew you were nearly done.”

I said nothing. She glanced up at me.

“Still not convinced, huh?”

“I don’t need to be convinced,” I told her. “What I have to say doesn’t count for much around here. You did all the convincing you needed to back there aboard Floating World.”

“Do you really think I would deceive these people deliberately?”

I thought about it for a moment. “No. I don’t think that’s it. But that doesn’t make you who you think you are.”

“Then how do you explain what has happened?”

“Like I said, I don’t have to. Call it the March of History if you like. Koi’s got what he wants.”

“And you? You haven’t got what you want out of this?”

I looked bleakly out at the wounded sky. “I don’t need anything I don’t already have.”

“Really? You’re very easily satisfied then.” She gestured around her. “So, no hope for a better tomorrow than this? I can’t interest you in an equitable restructuring of social systems?”

“You mean smash the oligarchy and the symbology they use to achieve dominance, hand power back to the people? That kind of thing?”

“That kind of thing.” It wasn’t clear if she was mimicking me or agreeing.

“Would you mind sitting down, it’s making my neck ache talking to you like this.”

I hesitated. It seemed unnecessarily churlish to refuse. I joined her on the surface of the dock, put my back to the weed bale and settled, waiting.

But then she was abruptly quiet. We sat shoulder to shoulder for a while.

It felt oddly companionable.

“You know,” she said finally, “when I was a kid, my father got this assignment on biotech nanobes. You know, the tissue-repair systems, the immune-boosters? It was kind of a review article, looking at the nanotech since landfall and where it was going next. I remember he showed me some footage of the state-of-the-art stuff being put into a baby at birth. And I was horrified.”

A distant smile.

“I can still remember looking at this baby and asking him how it was going to tell all those machines what to do. He tried to explain it to me, told me the baby didn’t have to tell them anything, they already knew what to do. They just had to be powered up.”

I nodded. “Nice analogy. I’m not—”

“Just. Give me a moment, huh? Imagine.” She lifted her hands as if framing something. “Imagine if some motherfucker deliberately didn’t enable most of those nanobes. Or enabled only the ones that dealt with brain and stomach functions, say. All the rest were just dead biotech, or worse still semi-dead, just sitting there consuming nutrients and not doing anything. Or programmed to do the wrong things. To destroy tissue instead of repairing it. To let in the wrong proteins, not to balance out the chemicals. Pretty soon that baby grows up and starts to have health problems. All the dangerous local organisms, the ones that belong here, that Earth’s never seen, they storm aboard and that kid is going to go down with every disease its ancestors on Earth never evolved defences for. So what happens then?”

I grimaced. “You bury it?”

“Well, before that. The doctors will come in and they’ll advise surgery, maybe replacement organs or limbs—”

“Nadia, you really have been gone a long time. Outside of battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—”

“Kovacs, it’s an analogy, alright? The point is, you end up with a body that works badly, that needs constant conscious control from above and outside and why? Not because of some intrinsic failing but because the nanotech just isn’t being used. And that’s us. This society—every society in the Protectorate—is a body where ninety-five per cent of the nanotech has been switched off. People don’t do what they’re supposed to.”

“Which is what?”

“Run things, Kovacs. Take control. Look after social systems. Keep the streets safe, administer public health and education. Build stuff. Create wealth and organise data, and ensure they both flow where they’re needed.

People will do all of this, the capacity is there, but it’s like the nanobes.

They have to be switched on first, they have to be made aware. And in the end that’s all a Quellist society is—an aware populace. Demodynamic nanotech in action.”

“Right—so the big bad oligarchs have switched off the nanotech.”

She smiled again. “Not quite. The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor, they’re like a closed sub-routine that’s got out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They’re programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes. That’s why you have to take them down first.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard this speech. Smash the ruling class and then everything’ll be fine, right?”

“No, but it’s a necessary first step.” Her animation was building visibly, she was talking faster. The setting sun painted her face with stained-glass light. “Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure—”

“Whoa.” I held up my hand. Most of this I’d heard from the Little Blue Bugs more than once in the past. I wasn’t going to sit through it again, nice sky or no nice sky. “Nadia, this has been tried before, and you know it. And from what I remember of my precolonial history, the empowered people you place so much faith in handed power right back to their oppressors, cheerfully, in return for not much more than holoporn and cheap fuel. Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe people would rather slobber over gossip and fleshshots of Josefina Hikari and Ryu Bartok than worry about who’s running the planet. Did you ever consider that? Maybe they’re happier that way.”

Scorn flickered on her face. “Yeah, maybe. Or just maybe that period you’re talking about was misrepresented. Maybe premillennial constitutional democracy wasn’t the failure the people who write the history books would like us to believe. Maybe, they just murdered it, took it away from us and lied to our children about it.”

I shrugged. “Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.”

“Of course they have.” It was almost a shout. “Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could walk and talk?”

“But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. “I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.”

“Yeah. Or maybe it’s just that you and your Quellist friends don’t want to see the limits of our evolved social biology.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. I tried to hold it down and the words came out gritted.

“That’s right. Bow down and fucking worship, do what the man with the beard or the suit tells you. Like I said, maybe people are happy like that.

Maybe the ones like you and me are just some fucking irritant, some swamp bug swarm that won’t let them sleep.”

“So, this is where you get off, is it?” She opened her eyes at the sky and glanced slantwise at me without lowering her head. “Give up, let scum like the First Families have it all, let the rest of humanity slip into a coma. Cancel the fight.”

“No, I suspect it’s already too late for that, Nadia.” I found there was none of the grim satisfaction in saying it that I’d expected. All I felt was tired. “Men like Koi are hard to stop once they’re set in motion. I’ve seen a few. And for better or worse, we are in motion now. You’re going to get your new Unsettlement, I think. Whatever I say or do.”

The stare still pinned me. “And you think it’s all a waste of time.”

I sighed. “I think I’ve seen it go wrong too many times on too many different worlds to believe this is going to be very different. You’re going to get a lot of people slaughtered for at best not very much in the way of local concessions. At worst, you’ll bring the Envoys down on Harlan’s World, and believe me, that you do not want in your worst nightmares.”

“Yes, Brasil told me. You used to be one of these stormtroopers.”

“That’s right.”

We watched the sun dying for a while.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t pretend to know anything about what they did to you in this Envoy Corps, but I have met men like you before. Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand. But it’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. At base, you don’t really want things to get any better because then you’d be out of targets. And if the external focus for your hate ran out, you’d have to face up to what’s inside you.”

I snorted. “And what is that?”

“Exactly? I don’t know. But I can hazard a few guesses. An abusive parent. A life on the streets. A loss of some sort early in childhood. Betrayal of some kind. And sooner or later, Kovacs, you need to face the fact that you can never go back and do anything about that. Life has to be lived forward.”

“Yeah,” I said tonelessly. “In the service of the glorious Quellist revolution no doubt.”

She shrugged. “That’d have to be your choice.”

“I’ve already made my choices.”

“And yet you came to prise me free of the Harlan family. You mobilised Koi and the others.”

“I came for Sylvie Oshima.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

There was another pause. Aboard the skimmer, Brasil disappeared into the cabin. I only caught the tail end of the motion, but it seemed abrupt and impatient. Tracking back, I saw Virginia Vidaura staring up at me.

“Then,” said the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita, “it would seem I’m wasting my time with you.”

“Yeah. I would think you are.”

If it made her angry, she didn’t show it. She just shrugged again, got up and gave me a curious smile, then wandered away along the sunset drenched dock, peering occasionally over the edge into the soupy water.

Later, I saw her talking to Koi, but she left me alone for the duration of the ride to Segesvar’s place.

As a final destination, the farm was not impressive. It broke the surface of the Expanse resembling nothing so much as a collection of waterlogged helium blimps sunk among the ruins of yet another U-shaped baling station. In fact, before the advent of the combines, the place had seen service as an independent belaweed dock, but unlike the other stations we’d stopped at, it hadn’t sold to the incoming corporate players and was derelict within a generation. Radul Segesvar had inherited the bare bones as part-payment of a gambling debt and must not have been too happy when he saw what he’d won. But he put the space to work, refitted the decaying station in deliberately antique style and extended the whole installation across what was previously the commercial capacity harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. Now the complex boasted a small, exclusive brothel, elegant casino facilities and the blood-rich heart of it all, the thing that gave customers a frisson they couldn’t duplicate in more urban surroundings, the fight pits.

There was a party of sorts when we arrived. Haiduci pride themselves on their hospitality and Segesvar was no exception. He’d cleared a space on one of the covered docks at the end of the old station and laid on food and drink, muted music, fragrant real-wood torches and huge fans to shift the swampy air. Handsome men and women drawn either from the brothel downstairs or one of Segesvar’s Newpest holoporn studios circulated with heavily-laden trays and limited clothing. Their sweat was artfully beaded in patterns across their exposed flesh and scented with tampered pheromones, their pupils were blasted open on some euphoric or other, their availability subtly hinted at. It was perhaps not ideal for a gathering of neoQuell activists, but that may have been deliberate on Segesvar’s part.

He’d never had much patience with politics.

In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.

Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger. Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.

The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.

Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.

“Did you kill her?” I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter—cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.

He stared away across the dock. “Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.”

“Real death?”

He nodded. “For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty eight hours of her life.”

“And the ones we lost?”

His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.

“Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.”

He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. “I don’t know. Probably they got them.”

Neither of us needed to follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation.

Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.

“Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.

“Enjoying the party?”

“Not yet.” I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. “I’ll get there.”

He smiled faintly. “You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?”

“Not right now.”

Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wetmaned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more.

Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.

One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soaplike in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.

I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.

Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.

“Okay, then. Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?”

I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar was working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.

“Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.”

He shrugged. “Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact.

You really are turning northern, Tak.”

“Like I said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are, already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.” He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. “Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.”

I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering.

The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the take cookie, barely tasting it.

“Well, you look like you’re having fun.”

“Envoy camouflage,” I said reflexively. “We’re trained to blend in.”

“Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.”

I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand, I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.

“Is one of those for me?”

“If you like.”

I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier western rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.

“I’m sorry about Ado,” I said.

She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.

“Not now, Tak.”

Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.

This, I remembered suddenly. This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived for.

And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime, why I had ever walked away.

It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning.

Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the take and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.

Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.

“You know,” she said finally. “I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to be one of the Bugs.”

“Maybe for her it wasn’t.”

I thought about Koi’s description of Mari Ado’s death, and I wondered if at the end she’d pulled the trigger to escape interrogation or simply a return to the family ties she’d spent her whole life trying to sever. I wondered if her aristo blood would have been enough to save her from Aiura’s wrath and what she would have had to do to walk away from the interrogation constructs in a fresh sleeve, what she would have had to buy back into to get out intact. I wondered if in the last few moments of dimming vision, she looked at the aristo blood from her own wounds, and hated it just enough.

“Jack’s talking some shit about heroic sacrifice.”

“Oh, I see.”

She swivelled her gaze down to my face. “That’s not why I’m here.”

I said nothing. She went back to looking at the ceiling.

“Oh shit, yes it is.”

We listened to the snarling and the shouts outside. Vidaura sighed and sat up. She jammed the heels of both hands against her eyes and shook her head.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asked me. “If we’re really human any more?”

“As Envoys?” I shrugged. “I try not to buy into the standard tremble-tremble-the-posthumans-are-coming crabshit, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head irritably. “Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, I know. But sometimes I talk to Jack and the others, and it’s like they’re a different fucking species to me. The things they believe. The level of belief they can bring to bear, with next to nothing to justify it.”

“Ah. So you’re not convinced either.”

“I don’t.” Vidaura threw up one hand in exasperation. She twisted about in the bed to face me. “How can she be, right?”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one caught in that particular net. Welcome to the rational-thinking minority.”

“Koi says she checks out. All the way down.”

“Yeah. Koi wants this so badly he’d believe a fucking ripwing in a headscarf was Quellcrist Falconer. I was there for the Ascertainment, and they went easy on anything it looked like she was uncomfortable answering. Did anybody tell you about this genetic weapon she’s triggered?”

She looked away. “Yeah, I heard. Pretty extreme.”

“Pretty much in complete defiance of every fucking thing Quellcrist Falconer ever believed, I think you mean.”

“We none of us get to stay clean, Tak.” A thin smile. “You know that. Under the circumstances—”

“Virginia, you’re about to prove yourself a fully paid-up, lost-in-belief member of the old-style human race if you’re not careful. And you needn’t think I’ll still talk to you if you cross over to that shit.”

The smile powered up, became a laugh of sorts. She touched her upper lip with her tongue and glanced slantwise at me. It gave me an odd, electric sensation to watch.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s be inhumanly rational about this. But Jack says she remembers the assault on Millsport. Going for the copter at Alabardos.”

“Yeah, which kind of sinks the copy stored in the heat of battle outside Drava theory, don’t you think? Since both those events postdate any presence she might have had in New Hok.”

Vidaura spread her hands. “It also sinks the idea she’s some kind of personality casing for a datamine. Same logic applies.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“You mean where does it leave Brasil and the Vchira gang?” I asked nastily. “Easy. It leaves them scratching around desperately for some other crabshit theory that’ll hold enough water to let them go on believing. Which, for fully paid-up neoQuellists is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.”

“No, I mean us.” Her eyes drilled me with the pronoun. “Where does it leave us?”

I covered for the tiny jolt in my stomach by rubbing at my eyes in an echo of the gesture she’d used earlier.

“I’ve got an idea of sorts,” I started. “Maybe an explanation.”

The door chimed.

Vidaura raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, and a guest list, looks like.”

I shot another glance at my watch, and shook my head. Outside the window, the snarling of the panthers seemed to have settled down to a low grumble and an occasional cracking sound as they ripped the cartilage in their food apart. I pulled on trousers, picked up the Rapsodia from the bedside table on an impulse and went through to open up.

The door flexed aside and gave me a view onto the quiet, dimly lit corridor outside. The woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve stood there, fully dressed, arms folded.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she said.

THIRTY-NINE

It was still early morning when we hit Vchira. The haiduci pilot Sierra Tres had got out of bed—her bed, in fact—was young and cocky, and the skimmer we lifted was the same contraband runner we’d come in on. No longer bound by the need to appear a standard, forgettable item of Expanse traffic and no doubt wanting to impress Tres as much as he impressed himself, the pilot opened his vessel up to the limit and we tore across to a mooring point called Sunshine Fun Jetties in less than two hours. Tres sat in the cockpit with him and made encouraging noises, while Vidaura and the woman who called herself Quell stayed below together. I sat alone on the forward deck for most of the trip, nursing my hangover in the cool flow of air from the slipstream.

As befitted the name, Sunshine Fun Jetties was a place frequented mostly by tour-bus skimmers from Newpest, and the odd rich kid’s garishly finned Expansemobile. At this time of day, there was a lot of mooring space to choose from. More importantly, it put us less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep at a pace that allowed for Sierra Tres and her limp. They were just opening when we arrived at the door.

“I’m not sure,” said the underling whose job it evidently was to get up earlier than any of the partners and man the offices until they arrived. “I’m not sure that—”

“Yeah, well I am,” Sierra Tres told him impatiently.

She’d belted on an ankle-length skirt to cover her rapidly healing leg, and there was no way of knowing from her voice and stance that she was still damaged. We’d left the pilot back at Sunshine Fun Jetties with the skimmer, but Tres didn’t need him. She played the haiduci arrogance card to perfection. The underling flinched.

“Look,” he began.

“No, you look. We were in here less than two weeks ago. You know that. Now you want to call Tudjman, you can. But I doubt he’ll thank you for getting him out of bed at this time of the morning just to confirm we can have access to the same stuff we used last time we were here.”

In the end it took the call to Tudjman and some shouting to clear it, but we got what we wanted. They powered up the virtual systems and showed us to the couches. Sierra Tres and Virginia Vidaura stood by while the woman in Oshima’s sleeve attached the electrodes to herself. She held up the hypnophones to me.

“What’s this meant to be?”

“High-powered modern technology.” I put on a grin I didn’t much feel.

On top of my hangover, anticipation was building a queasy, not-quite-real sensation that I could have done without. “Only been around a couple of centuries. They activate like this. Makes the ride in easier.”

When Oshima was settled, I lay down in the couch next to her and fitted myself with phones and trodes. I glanced up at Tres.

“So we’re all clear on what you do to pull me out if it starts to come apart?”

She nodded, expressionless. I still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d agreed to help us without running it by Koi or Brasil first. It seemed a little early in the scheme of things to be taking unqualified orders from the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

“Alright then. Let’s get in the pipe.”

The sonocodes had a harder time than usual dragging me under, but finally I felt the couch chamber blur out and the walls of the off-the-rack hotel suite scribbled into painfully sharp focus in its place. Memory of Vidaura in the suite down the corridor pricked at me unexpectedly.

Get a grip, Tak.

At least the hangover was gone.

The construct had decanted me on my feet, over by a window that looked out onto unlikely vistas of rolling green pasture. At the other side of the room by the door, a sketch of a long-haired woman similarly upright sharpened into Oshima’s sleeve.

We stood looking at each other for a moment, then I nodded. Something about it must have rung false, because she frowned.

“You’re sure about this? You don’t have to go through with it, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t expect—”

“Nadia, it’s okay. I’m trained to arrive on alien planets in new sleeves and start slaughtering the natives immediately. How hard can this be?”

She shrugged. “Alright.”

“Alright then.”

She crossed the room towards me and halted less than a metre away.

Her head tipped so that the mane of silver grey slipped slowly forward and covered her face. The central cord skidded sideways down one side of her skull and hung like a stunted scorpion tail, cobwebbed with finer filaments.

She looked in that moment like every archetype of haunting my ancestors had brought with them across the gulfs from Earth. She looked like a ghost.

Her posture locked up.

I drew a deep breath and reached out. My fingers parted the hair across her face like curtains.

Behind, there was nothing. No features, no structure, only a gap of dark warmth that seemed to expand out towards me like negative torchglow. I leaned closer and the darkness opened at her throat, peeling gently back along the vertical axis of her frozen figure. It split her to the crotch and then beyond, opening the same rent in the air between her legs. I could feel balance tipping away from me in tiny increments as it happened. The floor of the hotel room followed, then the room itself, shrivelling like a used wipe in a beach bonfire. The warmth came up around me, smelling faintly of static. Below was unrelieved black. The iron tresses in my left hand plaited about and thickened to a restless snakelike cable. I hung from it over the void.

Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.

I blinked, possibly in defiance, and stowed the recollection.

Grimaced and let go.

If it was falling, it didn’t feel like it.

There was no rush of air, and nothing lit to judge movement by. Even my own body was invisible. The cable seemed to have vanished as soon as

I took my hand off it. I could have been floating motionless in a grav chamber no bigger than the spread of my arms, except that all around me, somehow, my senses signalled the existence of vast, unused space. It was like being a spindrizzle bug, drifting about in the air of one of the emptied warehouses on Belacotton Kohei Nine.

I cleared my throat.

Lightning flickered jaggedly above me, and stayed there. Reflexively, I reached up and my fingers brushed delicate filaments. Perspective slammed into place—the light wasn’t fire in a sky unfathomably high up, it was a tiny branching of twigs a handful of centimetres over my head. I took it gently in my hand and turned it over. The light smudged from it where my fingers pressed. I let go and it hung there, at chest height in front of me.

“Sylvie? You there?”

That got me a surface under my feet and a bedroom steeped in late afternoon light. From the fittings, the place looked as if it might have belonged to a child of about ten. There were holos on the walls of Micky Nozawa, Rili Tsuchiya and a host of other pin-ups I didn’t recognise, a desk and datacoil under a window and a narrow bed. A mirrorwood panel on one wall made the limited space seem larger, a walk-in cupboard opposite opened onto a badly-hung mass of clothing that included court style dressing-up gowns. There was a Renouncer creed tacked to the back of the door, but it was coming away at one corner.

I peered out of the window and saw a classic temperate latitudes small town sloping down to a harbour and the outlying arm of a bay. Tinge of belaweed in the water, crescent slices of Hotei and Daikoku thinly visible in a hard blue sky. Could have been anywhere. Boats and human figures moved about in dispersal patterns close to real.

I moved to the door with the poorly-attached creed and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but when I tried to step out into the corridor beyond, a teenage boy appeared in front of me and shoved me back.

“Mum says you’ve to stay in your room,” he said obnoxiously. “Mum says.”

The door slammed in my face.

I stared at it for a long moment, then opened it again.

“Mum says you’ve—”

The punch broke his nose and knocked him back into the opposite wall. I held my fist loosely curled, waiting to see if he’d come back at me but he just slid down the wall, gaping and bleeding. His eyes glazed over with shock. I stepped carefully over his body and set off along the corridor.

Less than ten paces, and I felt her behind me.

It was minute and fundamental, a rustling in the texture of the construct, the scratch of crepe-edged shadows reaching along the walls at my back. I stopped dead and waited. Something curled like fingers over my head and around my neck.

“Hello, Sylvie.”

Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whisky I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colours washed out to grey, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.

“Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,” Sylvie Oshima said evenly, “it seems to have fallen apart.”

“It didn’t start here, Sylvie.”

She looked sideways at me. “Oh, I know. I said seems. But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.”

“Not this me.”

“No, so I understand.” She lifted the whisky to her lips. “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.

Change the subject.

“So what she hears up there filters down here?”

“To an extent.” The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct.

First the reflected image, from top to bottom and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it sombrely. “But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.”

“How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?”

“I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.”

“Is she real?”

A harsh laugh. “You’re asking me that? In here?”

“Alright, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?”

“She escaped.” Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. “That’s what she kept saying, escaped. Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.”

Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.

“That was a holding cell?”

“Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.”

“It wasn’t very hard to get out of.”

“Well, what language were you using?”

“Uh—Amanglic.”

“Yeah—in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.”

“But did you really expect me to stay put?”

“Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic‘

“Alright, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?”

“If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,” she said, rather bitterly, “You would have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behaviour, they just recognise and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.”

“So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?”

“Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.”

“And she’d have got out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.”

“More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough…”

“Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?”

A brief nod. “She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.”

“Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?”

Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. “It’s hard to see how she could be.”

“But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?”

Another shrug. “I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a virus for all you know.”

“Yeah, well from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement? A viral poison in the body of society?”

“I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.”

“Nor am I.” She tipped back her glass, emptied it again and set it down.

“Look, Micky, I’m not an activist and I’m not a soldier. I’m strictly a datarat. Mimints and code, that’s me. Put me in New Hok with a crew and there’s no one to touch me. But that’s not where we are right now, and you and I both know I’m not going back to Drava any time soon. So given the current climate, I think I’m going to bow out to this Nadia. Because whoever or whatever she really is, she stands a far better chance of navigating the waters than I do.”

She sat staring into her glass as it filled. I shook my head.

“This isn’t you, Sylvie.”

“Yes it is.” Suddenly her tone was savage. “My friends are fucking dead or worse, Micky. I’ve got a whole planet of cops plus the Millsport yakuza looking to make me the same way. So don’t tell me this isn’t me. You don’t know what happens to me under those circumstances because you haven’t fucking seen it before, alright. Even I don’t fucking know what happens to me under those circumstances.”

“Yeah, and instead of finding out, you’re going to stay in here like some fucking Renouncer dream of a good little girl your parents once had. Going to sit in here playing with your plug-in world, and hope someone on the outside takes care of business for you.”

She said nothing, just raised the newly-filled glass in my direction. I felt a sudden, constricting wave of shame pulse through me.

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. Would you like to live through what they did to Orr and the others? Because I’ve got it all on tap down here.”

“Sylvie, you can’t—”

“They died hard, Micky. Peeled back, all of them. At the end, Kiyoka was screaming like a baby for me to come and get her. You want to plug into that, carry that around with you for a while like I have to?”

I shivered, and it seemed to transmit itself to the whole construct. A small, cold thrum hung in the air around us.

“No.”

We sat for a long time in silence after that. Tokyo Crow’s clientele came and went around us, wraithlike.

After a while, she gestured vaguely upwards.

“You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.”

“If you let it be.”

“You called her a virus,” she said pensively. “As a virus, she was very successful in here. She infiltrated my systems as if she was designed for it. Maybe she’ll be as successful out there in the shadow play.”

I closed my eyes. Pressed a hand to my face.

“Something wrong, Micky?”

“Please tell me you’re being metaphorical now. I don’t think I can cope with another hardwired believer at the moment.”

“Hey, you don’t like the conversation, you can fuck off out of here, can’t you.”

The sudden edge on her voice kicked me back to New Hok and the seemingly endless deCom bickering. An unlooked-for smile tugged at my mouth with the memory. I opened my eyes and looked at her again. Placed both hands flat on the bar, sighed and let the smile come up.

“I came to get you out, Sylvie.”

“I know.” She put her hand over one of mine. “But I’m fine here.”

“I told Las I’d look after you.”

“So look after her. That keeps me safe too.”

I hesitated, trying to frame it right. “I think she might be some kind of weapon, Sylvie.”

“So? Aren’t we all?”

I looked around at the bar and its grey speed ghosts. The low murmur of amalgamated sound. “Is this really all you want?”

“Right now, Micky, it’s all I can cope with.”

My drink stood untouched on the bar in front of me. I stood up. Picked it up.

“Then I’d better be getting back.”

“Sure. I’ll see you out.”

The whisky went down burning, cheap and rough, not what I’d been expecting.

She walked with me out onto the wharf. Here the dawn was already up, cold and pale grey, and there were no people, speeded pastiche or otherwise, anywhere in the unforgiving light. The sweeper station stood closed and deserted, the mooring points and the ocean beyond were both empty of traffic. There was a naked, stripped look to everything and the Andrassy Sea came in and slapped at the pilings with sullen force. Looking north, you could sense Drava crouched below the horizon in similar, abandoned quiet.

We stood under the crane where we’d first met, and it hit me then with palpable force that this was the last time I’d see her.

“One question?”

She was staring out to sea. “Sure.”

“Your preferred active agent up there says she recognised someone in the holding constructs. Grigori Ishii. That chime with you at all?”

A slight frown. “It sounds familiar, yes. I couldn’t tell you from where though. But I can’t see how a personality would have got down here.”

“Well, quite.”

“Did she say it was this Grigori?”

“No. She said there was something down here that sounded like him. But when you flaked taking down the scorpion gun, afterwards when you were coming out of it in Drava you said it knew you, something knew you. Like an old friend.”

Sylvie shrugged. Most of her was still watching the northern horizon.

“Then it could be something the mimints have evolved. A virus to trigger recognition routines in a human brain, makes you think you’re seeing or hearing something you already know. Each individual it hits would assign an appropriate fragment to fit.”

“That doesn’t sound very likely. It’s not like the mimints have had much human interaction to work off recently. Mecsek’s only been in place what, three years?”

“Four.” A faint smile. “Micky, the mimints were designed to kill humans. That’s what they were for originally, three hundred years ago. There’s no telling if some piece of viral weaponry built along those lines has survived this long, maybe even sharpened itself a bit.”

“Have you ever come across anything like that?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.”

“Or in here.”

“Or in here,” she agreed shortly. She wanted me gone.

“Or it could just be another personality-casing bomb.”

“It could be.”

“Yeah.” I looked around one more time. “Well. How do I get out of here?”

“The crane.” For a moment she came back to me. Her eyes switched in from the north and met mine. She nodded upward to where a steel ladder disappeared into the laced girderwork of the machine. “You just keep climbing up.”

Great.

“You take care of yourself, Sylvie.”

“I will.”

She kissed me briefly on the mouth. I nodded, clapped her on the shoulder and backed away a couple of steps. Then I turned for the ladder, laid hands on the cold metal of the rungs and started climbing.

It seemed solid enough. It beat ripwing infested seacliff and the underside of Martian architecture, anyway.

I was a couple of dozen metres into the girders when her voice floated up to join me.

“Hey, Micky.”

I peered downward. She was standing inside the crane’s base, staring up at me. Her hands were cupped around her mouth. I unfastened one hand carefully and waved.

“Yeah?”

“Just remembered. Grigori Ishii. We learned about him in school.”

“Learned what about him in school?”

She spread her arms.

“No idea, sorry. Who remembers shit like that?”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Good question. Envoy caution seemed like the obvious answer. But stubborn mistrust came in a close second. A refusal. I wasn’t buying the glorious return of Quell at the cut rates Koi and the Bugs seemed prepared to accept.

“Maybe I will.”

“Well.” An arm lifted in farewell. “Scan up, Micky. Keep climbing, don’t look down.”

“Yeah,” I yelled it down. “You too, Sylvie.”

I climbed. The sweeper station shrank to the proportions of a child’s toy. The sea took on the texture of hammered grey metal welded to a tilting horizon. Sylvie was a dot facing north, then too small to make out at all. Maybe she wasn’t there any more. The girders around me lost any resemblance to the crane they had once been. The cold dawn light darkened to a flickery silver that danced in patterns on the metal that seemed maddeningly familiar. I didn’t seem to be tiring at all.

I stopped looking down.

FORTY

“So?” she asked finally.

I stared out of the window at Vchira Beach and the glitter of sunlight on the waves beyond. Both beach and water were beginning to fill up with tiny human figures intent on enjoying the weather. The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep were eminently environment-proofed, but you could almost feel the building heat, almost hear the rising chatter and squall of tourism that accompanied it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I came out of the construct.

“So you were right.” I spared a sideways glance for the woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s body, then went back to looking at the sea. The hangover was back in place, worse it seemed. “She’s not coming out. She’s fallen back on childhood Renouncer crabshit to cope with the grief, and she’s staying in there.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah.” I left the window alone, turned back to Tres and Vidaura. “We’re finished here.”

Nobody talked on the way back to the skimmer. We shouldered our way through brightly-garbed crowds, working against the flow in silence. A lot of the time, our faces opened passage for us—you could see it in the expressions of people stepping hurriedly aside. But in the sunny warmth and enthusiasm to get to the water, not everyone was running even a surface level of attention. Sierra Tres scowled as her leg took clouts from garishly-coloured plastic beach implements, badly carried, but either drugs or focus kept her mouth clamped shut over any pain she suffered. No one wanted to create a memorable scene. Only once she turned to look at a particularly clumsy offender, and he practically ran away.

Hey guys. The thought ran sourly through me. Don’t you recognise your political heroes when you see them? We’re coming to liberate you all.

At Sunshine Fun Jetties, the pilot was lying on the sloping flank of the skimmer, soaking up the sun like everybody else. He sat up blinking as we came aboard.

“That was quick. You want to get back already?”

Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.

“You see any reason to hang about?”

“Hey, it’s not so bad. I get down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time, ‘s a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.”

I looked up, surprised. “Yeah.”

“Someone asking after you.”

I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation.

The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.

“What did they want?”

“Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.”

I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.

“So what’d you tell him?”

“Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed rack with livewire, soon as look at them.”

“This guy young or old?”

“Oh, young. Carried himself too, know what I mean?”

Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind. Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.

Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.

Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.

“Tak—”

“You go back with the others now,” I said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Tak, we need you to—”

I smiled at her. “Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything any more. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do any more.”

She looked steadily back at me.

“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Rip out his throat and be right back.”

She shook her head.

“Is this really all you want?”

The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.

“What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia, you’ve done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.”

“So what instead? This? More pointless slaughter?”

I shrugged. “Pointless slaughter is what I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. You made me good at it, Virginia.”

That took her like a slap across the face. She flinched. Sierra Tres and the pilot looked on, curious. The woman who called herself Quell, I noticed, had gone below to the cabin.

“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”

I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”

“But it doesn’t solve anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”

“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.

“I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?”

Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.

“Only when I’m killing them.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”

“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”

She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.

She turned away without a word.

The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face, I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.

Sanctified solo assassins.

I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark.

They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.

So far.

I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins, you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to.

You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matt, low-profile pirate skimmers amidst the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.

Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly-kept façades and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon.

A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.

I found him well before evening.

It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defences of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board hire place called The Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.

“Sure, he checked in about a week back,” the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. “I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, got a real balance about him too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.” She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound.

“Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?”

“Surfers everywhere,” I agreed.

“So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?”

“Well.” I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. “It’s actually some thing I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.”

That appealed to her. She grinned and got up. “Sure, we can do that.”

She left the boards and came round to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia and fished it out.

“There you go.”

She took the little black device curiously. “That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?”

“No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight.”

“Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amidst the dust on ledge 74.

“Actually,” I said with feigned abruptness. “Can I get a room?”

She turned back, surprised. “Well, uh, sure …”

“Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.”

“Sure, no problem.” She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinised it for a moment and then gave me the grin again. “If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.”

“That’s very kind,” I said. “Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.”

Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.

“So you don’t want me to give him this?”

“Not any more thanks.” I smiled at her. “I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.”

Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive supplier warehouses.

The room beyond was cramped and basic. A capsule bathroom, a disposable mesh hammock to save on space and laundry, storage drawers moulded into the walls and a small plastic table and chair. A variable transparency window wired clumsily to the room’s climate control system the priest had left it dimmed. I cast about for somewhere to hide myself in the gloom and was driven into the capsule for lack of alternatives. Sting of recent antibac spray in my nose as I stepped in—the clean cycle must have run not long ago. I shrugged, breathed through my mouth and searched the cabinets for painkillers to flatten the rolling wave of my hangover. In one, I found a foil of basic heatstroke pills for tourists. I dry swallowed a couple and seated myself on the closed toilet unit to wait.

There’s something wrong here, the Envoy sense admonished me. Something doesn’t fit.

Maybe he’s not what you think.

Yeah, right—he’s a negotiator, come to talk you down. God’s changed his mind.

Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch.

These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.

Sarah seared across my mind. Momentarily, the world tilted around me with the depth of my fury. For the thousandth time I imagined the scene again, and there was a roaring in my ears like a distant crowd.

I drew the Tebbit knife and looked down at the dull, dark blade.

Slowly, with the sight, Envoy calm soaked back through me. I settled again in the small space of the capsule, letting it drench me to a chilled purpose. Fragments of Virginia Vidaura’s voice came with it.

Weapons are an extension. You are the killer and destroyer.

Kill quickly and be gone.

It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone.

I frowned a little at that one. It’s not good when your formative icons start getting inconsistent on you. When you find out they’re just as human as you.

The door wittered to itself and began to open.

Thought vanished like shreds in the slipstream of enabled force. I came out of the capsule, round the edge of its door and stood braced with the knife, ready to reach and stab.

He wasn’t what I’d imagined. The skimmer pilot and the girl downstairs had both remarked on his poise, and it showed in the way he spun at the tiny sounds of my clothing, the shift of air in the narrow room. But he was slim and slight, shaven skull delicate, beard an out-of-place idiocy on the fine features.

“You looking for me, holy man?”

For a moment we locked gazes and the knife in my hand seemed to tremble of its own accord.

Then he reached up and tugged at his beard, and it came away with a short static crackle.

“Of course I’m looking for you, Micky,” said Jadwiga tiredly. “Been chasing you for nearly a month.”

FORTY-ONE

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, twice at least.” Jad picked morosely at the beard prosthesis in her hands. We sat together at the cheap plastic table, not looking at each other. “Only reason I’m here, I guess. They weren’t looking for me when they came for the others.”

I saw Drava again as she told it, a mind’s-eye view of swirling snow on night-time black, the frosted constellations of camp lights and infrequent figures moving between buildings, hunched up against the weather.

They’d come the following evening, unannounced. It wasn’t clear if Kurumaya had been bought off, threatened with higher authority or simply murdered. Behind the funnelled force of Anton’s command software on max override, Kovacs and his team located Sylvie’s team by net signature. They kicked in doors, demanded submission.

Apparently didn’t get it.

“I saw Orr take someone down,” Jad went on, talking mechanically as she stared into her own memories. “Just the flash. He was yelling for everyone to get out. I was bringing carry-out back from the bar. I didn’t even …”

She stopped.

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“No, it’s not fucking okay, Micky. I ran away.”

“You’d be dead if you hadn’t. Really dead.”

“I heard Kiyoka screaming.” She swallowed. “I knew it was too late, but I …”

I hurried her past it. “Did anyone see you?”

A jerky nod. “Traded shots with a couple of them on the way across to the vehicle sheds. Fuckers were everywhere, seemed like. But they didn’t come after me. I think they thought I was just a stroppy bystander.” She gestured at the Eishundo sleeve she wore. “No trace on the net search, see. Far as that fucker Anton’s concerned, I was invisible.”

She’d lifted one of the Dracul bugs, powered it up and driven right off the side of the dock.

“Had a squabble with the autosub systems getting up the estuary,” she said, and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re not supposed to do that, put vehicles in the water without authorisation. But the clear tags worked in the end.”

And out onto the Andrassy Sea.

I nodded mechanically, exact inverse of my near disbelief. She’d ridden the bug without resting, nearly a thousand kilometres back to Tekitomura and a quiet night-time landing in a cove out of town to the east.

She shrugged it off.

“I had food and water in the panniers. Meth to stay awake. The Dracul’s got Nuhanovic guidance. Main thing I worried about was keeping low enough to the water to look like a boat not a flying machine, trying not to upset the angelfire.”

“And you found me how?”

“Yeah, that’s some weird shit.” For the first time, something bloomed in her voice that wasn’t weariness and rancid rage. “I sold the bug for quick cash at Soroban wharf, I was walking back up towards Kompcho. Coming down from the meth. And it’s like I could smell you or something. Like the smell of this old family hammock we had when I was a kid. I just followed it, like I said I was coming down, running on autopilot. I saw you on the wharf, going aboard this piece-of-shit freighter. Haiduci’s Daughter.”

I nodded again, this time in sudden comprehension as large chunks of the puzzle fell into place. The dizzying, unaccustomed sense of family longing swam back over me. We were twins, after all. Close scions from the long-dead house of Eishundo.

“You stowed away, then. It was you trying to get inside that pod when the storm hit.”

She grimaced. “Yeah, creeping around on deck’s fine when the sun’s shining. Not something you want to try when there’s heavy weather coming in. I should have guessed they’d have it alarmed up the arse. Fucking webjelly oil, you’d think it was Khumalo wetware the price they get for it.”

“You stole the food out of communal storage too, second day out.”

“Hey, your ride was flying departure lights when I saw you go aboard. Left inside an hour. Didn’t exactly leave me much time to go stock up on provisions. I went a day without food before I figured you weren’t getting off at Erkezes, you were in for the long haul. I was fucking hungry.”

“You know there was a nearly a fight over that. One of your deCom colleagues wanted to brain someone for stealing it.”

“Yeah, heard them talking. Fucking burnouts.” Her voice took on a kind of automated distaste, a macro of opinion over old ground. “Kind of sad case losers get the trade a bad name.”

“So you tracked me across Newpest and the Expanse as well.”

Another humourless smile. “My home turf, Micky. And besides, that skimmer you took left a soup wake I could have followed blindfolded. Guy I hired got your ride on the radar pulling into Kem Point. I was there by nightfall, but you’d gone.”

“Yeah. So why the fuck didn’t you come knock on my cabin door while you had the chance, aboard Haiduci’s Daughter?”

She scowled. “How about because I didn’t trust you?”

“Alright.”

“Yeah, and while we’re on the subject how about I still don’t? How about you explain what the fuck you’ve done with Sylvie?”

I sighed.

“Got anything to drink?”

“You tell me. You’re the one broke into my room.”

Somewhere inside me something shifted, and I suddenly understood how happy I was to see her. I couldn’t work out if it was the biological tie of the Eishundo sleeves, remembrance of the month’s snappish-ironic camaraderie in New Hok, or just the change from Brasil’s suddenly serious born-again revolutionaries. I looked at her standing there and it was like the gust of an Andrassy Sea breeze through the room.

“Good to see you again, Jad.”

“Yeah, you too,” she admitted.

When I’d laid it all out for her, it was dark outside. Jad got up and squeezed past me in the narrow space, stood by the variable transparency window staring out. Street lighting frosted dimly in the gloomed glass.

Raised voices floated up, some kind of drunken argument.

“You sure it was her you talked to?”

“Pretty sure. I don’t think this Nadia, whoever she is, whatever she is, I don’t think she could run the command software. Certainly not well enough to generate an illusion that coherent.”

Jad nodded to herself.

“Yeah, that Renouncer shit was always going to catch up with Sylvie some day. Fuckers get you that young, you never really shake it off. So what about this Nadia thing? You really think she’s a personality mine? ‘cause I got to say, Micky, in nearly three years of tracking around New Hok, I never saw or heard of a datamine that carried that much detail, that much depth.”

I hesitated, feeling around the edges of Envoy-intuited awareness for a gist that could be stamped into something as crude as words.

“I don’t know. I think she’s, I don’t know, some kind of spec designation weapon. Everything points to Sylvie getting infected in the Uncleared. You were there for Iyamon Canyon, right?”

“Yeah. She flaked in an engagement. She was sick for weeks after. Orr tried to pretend it was just post-op blues, but anyone could see different.”

“And before that, she was fine?”

“Well, she was a deCom head, that’s not a job that leans towards fine. But all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon, yeah.”

“Sites someone else had worked?”

“Yeah, you know.” In the reflection of the window, the irritation flared on her face like matchglow, then guttered out as suddenly. “No, come to think of it, you don’t, you weren’t around for any of those.”

“Any of what?”

“Ah, handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other.”

Something from my first meeting with Kurumaya snapped into focus.

Sylvie wheedling, the camp commander’s impassive responses.

Oshima-san, the last time I ramped you ahead of schedule, you neglected your assigned duties and disappeared north. How do I know you won’t do the same thing this time? Shig, you sent me to look at wreckage. Someone got there before us, there was nothing left. I told you that.

When you finally resurfaced, yes.

Oh, be reasonable. How was I supposed to deCom what’s already been trashed?

We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.

I frowned as the new fragment slid into place. Smooth and snug, like a fucking splinter. Distress radiated out through the theories I was building.

It didn’t fit with any of what I was starting to believe.

“Sylvie said something about it when we went to get the clean-up duty. Kurumaya ramped you and when you got to the assigned location, there was nothing but wreckage.”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Wasn’t the only time it happened either. We ran across the same thing in the Uncleared a few times.”

“You never talked about this when I was around.”

“Yeah, well, deCom.” Jad pulled a sour face at herself in the window.

“For people with heads full of state-of-the-art tech, we’re a superstitious bunch of fuckers. Not considered cool to talk about stuff like that. Brings bad luck.”

“So let me get this straight. This mimint suicide stuff, that dated from after Iyamon as well.”

“Near as I remember, yeah. So you going to tell me about this spec weapon theory of yours?”

I shook my head, juggling the new data. “I’m not sure. I think she was designed to trigger this genetic Harlan-killer. I don’t think the Black Brigades abandoned their weapon, I don’t think they got exterminated before they could set it off. I think they built this thing as the initial trigger and hid it in New Hok, a personality-casing with a programmed will to set off the weapon. She believes she’s Quellcrist Falconer, because that gives her the drive. But that’s all it is, a propulsion system. When it comes to the crunch, setting off a genetic curse in people who weren’t even born when it was conceived, she behaves like a completely different person, because in the end it’s the target that matters.”

Jad shrugged. “Sounds exactly like every political leader I ever heard of anyway. Ends and means, you know. Why should Quellcrist Falconer be any fucking different?”

“Yeah, I don’t know.” A curious, unlooked-for resistance to her cynicism dragging through me. I looked at my hands. “You look at Quellis life, most of what she did bears out her philosophy, you know. Even this copy of her, or whatever it is, even she can’t make her own actions fit with what she thinks she is. She’s confused about her own motivations.”

“So? Welcome to the human fucking race.”

There was a bitter edge on the words that made me glance up. Jad was still at the window, staring at her reflected face.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said gently.

She didn’t look at me, didn’t look away. “Maybe not. But I know what I felt, and it wasn’t enough. This fucking sleeve has changed me. It cut me out of the net loop—”

“Which saved your life.”

An impatient shake of her shaven head. “It stopped me feeling with the others, Micky. It locked me out. It even changed things with Ki, you know. We never felt the same about each other that last month.”

“That’s quite common with resleeving. People learn to—”

“Oh, yeah, I know.” Now she turned away from the image of herself and stared at me. “A relationship is not easy, a relationship is work. We both tried, tried harder than we ever had before. Harder than we ever had to before. That’s the problem. Before, we didn’t have to try. I was wet for her just looking at her sometimes. It was all either of us needed, a touch, a look. That fucking went, all of it.”

I said nothing. There are times when there is nothing you can usefully say. All you can do is listen, wait and watch as this stuff comes out. Hope that it’s a purge.

“When I heard her scream,” Jad said, with difficulty. “It was like, it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter enough. I didn’t feel it enough to stay and fight. In my own body, I would have stayed and fought.”

“Stayed and died, you mean.”

A careless shrug, a flinching away like tears.

“This is crabshit, Jad. It’s the guilt talking because you survived. You tell yourself this but there’s nothing you could have done, and you know it.”

She looked at me then, and she was crying, quiet ribbons of tears and a smeared grimace.

“What the fuck do you know about it, Micky? It’s just another fucking version of you that did this to us. You’re a fucking destroyer, an ex-Envoy burnout. You were never deCom. You never belonged, you don’t know what it was like to be a part of that. How close it was. You don’t know what it feels like to lose that.”

Briefly, my mind fled back to the Corps and Virginia Vidaura. The rage after Innenin. It was the last time I’d really belonged to anything, well over a century gone. I’d felt twinges of the same thing after, the fresh growth of comradeship and united purpose—and I’d ripped it up by the roots every time. That shit will get you killed. Get you used.

“So,” I said, brutally casual. “Now you’ve tracked me down. Now you know. What are you going to do about it?”

She wiped tears from her face with hard strokes that were almost blows.

“I want to see her,” she said.

FORTY-TWO

Jad had a small, battered skimmer she’d hired in Kem Point. It was parked under harsh security lighting on a rental ramp at the back of the hostel.

We went out to it, collecting a cheery wave from the girl on reception, who seemed to have derived a touching delight from her role in our successful reunion. Jad coded the locks on the sliding roof, clambered behind the wheel and spun us rapidly out into the dark of the Expanse. As the glimmer of lights from the Strip shrank behind us, she tore off the beard again and gave me the wheel while she stripped off her robes.

“Yeah, why wrap yourself up like that?” I asked her. “What was the point?”

She shrugged. “Cover. I figured I had the yak looking for me at least, and I still didn’t know what your end was, who you were playing for. Best to stay cloaked. Everywhere you go, people tend to leave the Beards alone.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, even the cops.” She lifted the ochre surplice over her head.

“Funny stuff, religion. No one wants to talk to a priest.”

“Especially one that might declare you an enemy of God for the way you cut your hair.”

“Well, yeah, that too I guess. Anyway, I got some novelty shop in Kem Point to make up the stuff, told them it was for a beach party. And you know what, it works. No one talks to me. Plus.” She freed herself from the rest of the robes with accustomed ease and jabbed a thumb at the mimintkiller shard gun strapped under her arm. “Makes great cover for the hardware.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“You lugged that fucking cannon all the way down here? What were you planning to do, splatter me across the Expanse with it?”

She gave me a sober look. Under the straps of the holster, her deCom T-shirt was printed with the words Caution: Smart Meat Weapon System.

“Maybe,” she said, and turned away to stow her disguise at the back of the tiny cabin.

Navigating the Expanse at night isn’t much fun when you’re driving a rental with the radar capacity of child’s toy. Both Jad and I were Newpest natives, and we’d seen enough skimmer wrecks growing up to throttle back and take it slow. It didn’t help that Hotei was still down and mounting cloud shrouded Daikoku at the horizon. There was a commercial traffic lane for the tourist buses, illuminum marker buoys marching off into the weed-fragrant night, but it wasn’t much help. Segesvar’s place was a long way off the standard routes. Within half an hour the buoys had faded out of sight and we were alone with the scant coppery light of a high-flung, speeding Marikanon.

“Peaceful out here,” Jad said, as if making the discovery for the first time.

I grunted and wheeled us left as the skimmer’s lights picked out a sprawl of tepes root ahead. The outermost branches scraped loudly on the metal of the skirt as we passed. Jad winced.

“Maybe we should have waited for morning.”

I shrugged. “Go back if you like.”

“No, I think—”

The radar blipped.

We both looked at the console, then at each other. The reported presence blipped again, louder.

“Maybe a bale freighter,” I said.

“Maybe.” But there was a hardened deCom dislike in her face as she watched the signal build.

I killed the forward drives and waited as the skimmer coasted to a gentle halt on the murmur of lift stabilisers. The scent of weed pressed inward. I stood up and leaned on the edge of the opened roof panels. Faintly, along with the smells of the Expanse, the breeze carried the sound of motors approaching.

I dropped back into the body of the cockpit.

“Jad, I think you’d better take the artillery and get up near the tail. Just in case.”

She nodded curtly and gestured for me to give her some space. I backed up and she swung herself effortlessly up onto the roof, then freed the shard blaster from its webbing holster. She glanced down at me.

“Fire control?”

I thought for a moment, then pumped the stabilisers. The murmuring of the lift system rose to a sustained growl, then sank back.

“Like that. You hear that, you shoot up everything in sight.”

“ ‘kay.”

Her feet scuffed on the superstructure, heading aft. I stood up again and watched as she settled into the cover of the skimmer’s tail assembly, then turned my attention back to the closing signal. The radar set was a bare minimum insurance necessity installation and it gave no detail beyond the steadily increasing blotch on the screen. But a couple of minutes later I didn’t need it. The gaunt, turreted silhouette rose on the horizon, came ploughing towards us and might as well have had an illuminum sign pasted on its prow.

Pirate.

Not dissimilar to a compact ocean-going hoverloader, it ran no navigation lights at all. It sat long and low on the surface of the Expanse, but bulked with crude plate armouring and weapons pods custom-welded to the original structure. I cranked neurachem vision and got the vague sense of figures moving about in low red lighting behind the glass panels at the nose, but no activity near the guns. As the vessel loomed and turned broadside to me, I saw lateral scrape marks in the metal of the skirt. Legacy of all the engagements that had ended in hull-to-hull boarding assault.

A spotlight snapped on and panned across me, then switched back and held. I held up my hand against the glare. Neurachem squeezed a view of silhouettes in a snub conning tower atop the pirate’s forward cabin. A young male voice, cranked tense with chemicals, floated across the soupy water.

“You Kovacs?”

“I’m Serendipity. What do you want?”

A dry, mirthless cackle. “Serendipity. Well, I just guess you fucking are. Serendipitous to the max from where I’m standing.”

“I asked you a question.”

“What do I want. Heard you. Well, what I want, first and foremost, I want your slim pal back there at the stern to stand down and put her hardware away. We’ve got her on infrared anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to turn her into panther feed with the vibe gun, but then you’d be upset, right?”

I said nothing.

“See, and you upset gets me nowhere. Supposed to keep you happy, Kovacs. Bring you along, but keep you happy. So your pal stands down, I’m happy, no need for fireworks and gore, you’re happy, you come along with me, people I work for are happy, they treat me right, I get even happier. Know what that’s called, Kovacs? That’s a virtuous circle.”

“Want to tell me who the people you work for are?”

“Well, yeah, I want to, obviously, but there’s just no way I can, see. Under contract, not a word to pass my lips about that shit ‘til you’re at the table and doing the something for you, something for me boogie. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to take all of this on trust.”

Or be blasted apart trying to leave.

I sighed and turned to the stern.

“Come on out, Jad.”

There was a long pause, and then she emerged from the shadows of the tail assembly, shard blaster hanging at her side. I still had the neurachem up, and the look on her face said she’d rather have fought it out.

“That’s much better,” called the pirate cheerfully. “Now we’re all friends.”

FORTY-THREE

His name was Vlad Tepes, named apparently not for the vegetation but after some dimly remembered folk-hero from pre-colonial times. He was lanky and pale, wearing flesh like some cheap, young shaven-headed version of Jack Soul Brasil that they’d thrown out at prototype stage. Flesh that something told me was his own, his first sleeve, in which case he wasn’t much older than Isa had been. There were acne scars on his cheeks that he fingered occasionally and he trembled from head to foot with tetrameth overload. He overgestured and laughed too much, and at some point in his young life he’d had the bone of his skull opened at the temples and filled with jagged lightning-flash sections of purple-black alloy cement. The stuff glinted in the low light aboard the pirate vessel as he moved about and when you looked at him head on, it gave his face a faintly demonic aspect which was obviously what was intended. The men and women around him on the bridge gave ground with alacrity to his jerky, meth-driven motion, and respect read out in their eyes as they watched him.

The radical surgery aside, he reminded me of Segesvar and myself at that age, so much that it ached.

The vessel, perhaps predictably, rejoiced in the name Impaler, and it ran due west at speed, trampling imperiously through obstacles smaller and less armoured skimmers would have needed to go around.

“Got to,” Vlad informed us succinctly as something crunched under the armoured skirt. “Everyone’s been looking for you on the Strip, and not very well is my guess, ‘cause they didn’t find you, did they. Hah! Anyway, wasted a fuck of a lot of time that way and my clients, they seem pushed temporally, if you know what I mean.”

On the identity of the clients, he remained steadfastly closemouthed, which, on that much meth, is no mean feat.

“Look, be there soon, anyway,” he jittered, face twitching. “Why worry?”

In this at least, he was telling the truth. Barely an hour after we’d been taken aboard, Impaler slowed and drifted cautiously broadside towards a decayed ruin of a baling station in the middle of nowhere. The pirate’s coms officer ran a series of scrambled interrogation protocols and whoever was inside the ruined station had a machine that knew the code. The coms woman looked up and nodded. Vlad stood glitter-eyed before his instrument displays and snapped instructions like insults. Impaler picked up a little lateral speed again, fired grapple lines into the evercrete dock pilings with a series of splintering smacks and then cranked itself in tight. Green lights and a gangplank extended.

“Let’s go then, come on.” He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honour guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed, chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris, and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarised windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.

Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still …

I remembered the voyage aboard the Angelfire Flirt, the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.

And then everything came tumbling down.

“Hello Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?”

Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.

“Didn’t see that one coming, huh?” he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?”

“Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?” He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. “Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there too.”

I felt Jad bristle at my back.

“She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.”

He shrugged and nodded at my newly-acquired pirate friends. “Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.”

It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.

“That was a joke,” he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.

“Yeah, I guessed.” Jad wandered past me to the windows and peered out at the moored bulk of the Impaler. “So Micky, Tak, Kovacs, whoever the fuck you are at the moment. Want to introduce me to your friend?”

“Uh, yeah. Tod, this is Jadwiga. As you obviously already know, she’s from deCom. Jad, Todor Murakami, colleague of mine from, uh, the old days.”

“I’m an Envoy,” Murakami supplied casually.

To her credit, Jad barely blinked. She took the hand he offered with a slightly incredulous smile, then propped herself against the outward lean of the tower windows and folded her arms.

Murakami took the hint.

“So what’s all this about?”

I nodded. “We can start there.”

“I think you can probably guess.”

“I think you can probably drop the elicitation and just tell me.”

He grinned and touched a trigger finger to his temple. “Sorry, force of habit. Alright, look. Here’s my problem. According to sources, seems you’ve got a little revolutionary momentum up here, maybe enough to seriously rock the First Families’ boat.”

“Sources?”

Another grin. No ground given up. “That’s right. Sources.”

“I didn’t know you guys were deployed here.”

“We’re not.” A little of his Envoy cool slipped from him, as if by the admission he’d lost some kind of vital access to it. He scowled. “Like I said, this is pro bono. Damage limitation. You know as well as I do, we can’t afford a neoQuellist uprising.”

“Yeah?” This time, I was the one grinning. “Who’s we, Tod? The Protectorate? The Harlan family? Some other bunch of super-rich fucks?”

He gestured irritably. “I’m talking about all of us, Tak. You really think that’s what this planet needs, another Unsettlement. Another war?”

“Takes two sides to run a war, Tod. If the First Families wanted to accept the neoQuellist agenda, institute reforms, well.” I spread my hands. “Then I can’t see there’d be any need for an uprising at all. Maybe you should be talking to them.”

A frown. “Why are you talking like this, Tak? Don’t tell me you’re buying into this shit.”

I paused. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What kind of fucked political philosophy is that?”

“It isn’t a philosophy at all, Tod. It’s just a feeling that maybe we’ve all had enough. That maybe it’s time to burn these motherfuckers down.”

He frowned. “I can’t allow that. Sorry.”

“So why don’t you just call down the wrath of the Envoys and stop wasting time?”

“Because I don’t fucking want the Corps here.” There was a sudden, brief desperation in his face as he spoke. “I’m from here, Tak. This is my home. You think I want to see the World turned into another Adoracion? Another Sharya?”

“Very noble of you.” Jad shifted against the canted windows, came forward to the table and poked at the datacoil. Purple and red sparked around her fingers where they broke the field. “So what’s the battleplan, Mister Qualms?”

His eyes flickered between the two of us, came to rest on me. I shrugged.

“It’s a fair question, Tod.”

He hesitated for a moment. It made me think of the moment I’d had to unpin my own numbed fingers from the cable beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura. He was letting go of a lifetime of Envoy commitment here, and my own lapsed membership of the Corps wasn’t much in the way of a justification.

Finally, he grunted and spread his hands.

“Okay. Here’s the newsflash.” He pointed at me. “Your pal Segesvar has sold you out.”

I blinked. Then: “No fucking way.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Haiduci dues, right? He owes you. Thing is, Tak, you got to ask yourself which of you he thinks he owes.”

Oh shit.

He saw it hit me and nodded again. “Yeah, I know all about that too. See, Takeshi Kovacs saved Segesvar’s life a couple of centuries ago, objective time. But that’s something both copies of you did. Old Radul’s got a debt alright, but he apparently sees no reason to discharge it more than the once. And your younger, fresher self has just cut a deal on that very basis. Segesvar’s men took most of your beach party revolutionaries early this morning. Would have got you, Vidaura and the deCom woman too, if you hadn’t all taken off on some crack-of-dawn errand to the Strip.”

“And now?” The last stubborn fragments of clinging hope. Scour them out, and face the facts with features carved out of stone. “They’ve got Vidaura and the others now?”

“Yes, they took them on their return. They’re holding everyone until Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka can arrive with a clean-up squad. Had you gone back with the others, you’d be sharing a locked room with them now. So.” A rapidly flexed smile, a raised brow. “Looks like you owe me a favour.”

I let the fury come aboard, like deep breath, like a swelling. Let it rage through me, then tamped it carefully down like a half-smoked seahemp cigar, saved for later. Lock it down, think.

“How come you know all this, Tod?”

He gestured, self-deprecating. “Like I said, I live here. Pays to keep the wires humming. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is. Who’s your fucking source, Tod?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I shrugged. “Then I can’t help you.”

“You’re just going to let it all go? Segesvar sells you out, he gets to walk away? Your friends from the beach get to die? Come on, Tak.”

I shook my head. “I’m tired of fighting other people’s battles for them. Brasil and friends got themselves into this, they can get themselves out. And Segesvar will keep. I’ll get to him later.”

“And Vidaura?”

“What about her?”

“She trained us, Tak.”

“Yeah, us. Get on and save her yourself.”

If you weren’t an Envoy, you would have missed it. It was less than a flicker, some millimetric shift in stance, maybe not even that. But Murakami slumped.

“I can’t do it on my own,” he said quietly. “I don’t know the inside of Segesvar’s place, and without that I’d need an Envoy platoon to take it.”

“Then call in the Corps.”

“You know what that would do to—”

“Then tell me who your flicking source is.”

“Yeah,” said Jad sardonically, in the quiet that followed. “Or just ask him to come in from next door.”

She caught my eye and nodded at a closed drop-hatch in the back of the tower room. I took a step towards it and Murakami could barely hold himself back from the blocking move he wanted to make. He glared at Jad.

“Sorry,” she said, and tapped her head with a forefinger. “Dataflow alert. Pretty standard wincefish hardware. Your friend in there is using a phone, and he’s moving about a lot. Pacing nervously would be my guess.”

I grinned at Murakami. “Well, Tod. Your call.”

The tension lasted a couple of seconds more, then he sighed and gestured me forward.

“Go ahead. You would have worked it out sooner or later anyway.”

I went to the drop-hatch, found the panel and thumbed it. The machinery grumbled to itself somewhere deep in the building. The hatch cranked upward in juddery, hesitant increments. I leaned into the space it left.

“Good evening. So which one of you’s the snitch?”

Four faces turned towards me, and as soon as I saw them, four severely dressed figures in black, the pieces thumped into place in my head like the sound of the drop-hatch reaching the end of its recess. Three were muscle, two men and and a woman and the skin on their faces all had a shiny plastic elasticity where their facial tattooing had been sprayed over. It was a short-term, daily option that wouldn’t stand much professional scrutiny.

But deep as they were into haiduci turf, it probably would save them from having to fight pitched battles on every Newpest street corner.

The fourth, the one holding the phone, was older but unmistakable by demeanour alone. I nodded my understanding.

“Tanaseda, I presume. Well, well.”

He bowed slightly. It went with the package, the same groomed, old school manners and look. He wore no facial skin decoration because at the levels he’d attained, he would be a frequent visitor in First Family enclaves that would frown on it. But you could still see the honour scars where they had been removed without benefit of modern surgical technique. His grey streaked black hair was bound back tightly in a short ponytail, the better to reveal the scarring across the forehead and accentuate the long bones of the face. The eyes beneath the brow were brown and hard like polished stones. The careful smile he gave me was the same one he would bestow upon death if and when it came for him.

“Kovacs-san.”

“So what’s your end of this, sam?” The muscle bristled collectively at my disrespect. I ignored it, glanced back at Murakami instead. “I take it you know he wants me Really Dead, as slowly and unpleasantly as possible.”

Murakami locked gazes with the yakuza senior.

“That can be resolved,” he murmured. “Is this not so, Tanaseda-san?”

Tanaseda bowed again. “It has come to my notice that though you were involved in the death of Hirayasu Yukio, you were not wholly to blame.”

“So?” I shrugged to displace the rising anger, because the only way he could have heard that little snippet was through virtual interrogation of Orr or Kiyoka or Lazlo, after my younger self helped him kill them.

“Doesn’t usually cut much ice with you people, who’s really to blame or not.”

The woman in his entourage made a tiny growling sound deep in her throat. Tanaseda cut it with a tiny motion of his hand at his side, but the gaze he bent on me belied the calm in his tone.

“It has also become clear to me that you are in possession of Hirayasu Yukio’s cortical storage device.”

“Ah.”

“Is this so?”

“Well, if you think I’m going to let you search me for it, you can—”

“Tak.” Murakami’s voice came out lazy, but it wasn’t. “Behave. Do you have Hirayasu’s stack or not?”

I paused on the hinge of the moment, more than half of me hoping they might try to strongarm it. The man on Tanaseda’s left twitched and I smiled at him. But they were too well-trained.

“Not on me,” I said.

“But you could deliver it to Tanaseda-san, could you not?”

“If I had any incentive to, I suppose I could, yes.”

The soft-throated snarl again, back and forth among all three of the yakuza muscle this time.

“Ronin,” one of them spat.

I met his eye. “That’s right, sam. Masterless. So watch your step. There’s no one to call me to heel if I take a dislike to you.”

“Nor anyone to back you up when you find yourself in a corner,” observed Tanaseda. “May we please dispense with this childishness, Kovacs-san? You speak of incentives. Without the information I have supplied, you would now be captive with your colleagues, awaiting execution. And I have offered to revoke my own writ for your elimination. Is this not enough for the return of a cortical stack you have in any case no use for?”

I smiled. “You’re full of shit, Tanaseda. You’re not doing this for Hirayasu. He’s a fucking waste of good sea air, and you know it.”

The yakuza master seemed to coil tighter into himself as he stared at me. I still wasn’t sure why I was pushing him, what I was pushing for.

“Hirayasu Yukio is my brother-in-law’s only son.” Very quietly, barely a murmur across the space between us, but edged with contained fury.

“There is giri here that I would not expect a southerner to understand.”

“Motherfucker,” said Jad wonderingly.

“Ah, what do you expect, Jad?” I made a noise in my throat. “In the end, he’s a criminal, no different than the fucking haiduci. Just a different mythology and the same crabshit delusions of ancient honour.”

“Tak—”

“Back off, Tod. Let’s get this out in the open where it belongs. This is politics, and nothing even remotely cleaner. Tanaseda here isn’t worried about his nephew once removed. That’s just a side bonus. He’s worried he’s losing his grip, he’s afraid of being punished for a fucked-up blackmail attempt. He’s watching Segesvar get ready to make friends with Aiura Harlan, and he’s terrified the haiduci are going to get cut in on some serious global action in return for their trouble. All of which his Millsport cousins are likely to lay pretty directly at his front door, along with a short sword and a set of instructions that read insert here and slice sideways. Right, Tan?”

The muscle on the left lost it, as I suspected he might. A needle-thin blade dropped from his sleeve into his right hand. Tanaseda snapped something at him and he froze. His eyes blazed at me and his knuckles whitened around the hilt of the knife.

“See,” I told him. “Masterless samurai don’t have this problem. There’s no leash. If you’re ronin, you don’t have to watch honour sold out for political expediency.”

“Tak, will you just fucking shut up,” groaned Murakami.

Tanaseda stepped past the taut, rippling tension on the furious bodyguard.

He watched me through narrowed eyes, as if I was some kind of poisonous insect he needed to examine more closely.

“Tell me, Kovacs-san,” he said quietly. “Is it your wish to die at the hands of my organisation after all? Are you looking for death?”

I held his eye for a few seconds, then made a tiny spitting sound.

“You couldn’t even begin to understand what I’m looking for, Tanaseda. You wouldn’t recognise it if it bit your dick off. And if you did stumble on it by accident, you’d just find some way to sell it.”

I looked across to Murakami, whose hand rested still on the butt of the Kalashnikov at his waist. I nodded.

“Alright, Tod. I’ve seen your snitch. I’m in.”

“Then we have an agreement?” Tanaseda asked.

I compressed a breath and turned back to face him. “Just tell me this. How long ago did Segesvar cut his deal with the other copy of me?”

“Oh, not recently.” I couldn’t tell if there was any satisfaction in his voice. “I believe he has known that you both exist for some weeks now. Your copied self has been most active in tracing old connections.”

I thought back to Segesvar’s appearance at the inland harbour. His voice over the phone. We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake and a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed. I wondered if, even then, he’d already been making a decision, savouring the curious circumstance of being able to choose a place for his indebtedness to reside.

If so, I hadn’t done myself any favours in the competition with my younger self. And Segesvar had made it plain, the previous night, almost come out and said it to my face.

Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that any time in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.

Like I said—

Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.

Had he been saying goodbye?

You’re a hard man to please, Tak.

Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?

For just a second, an old, small sadness welled up in me.

The anger trampled it down. I looked up at Tanaseda and nodded.

“Your nephew is buried under a beach house south of Kem Point. I’ll draw you a map. Now give me what you’ve got.”

FORTY-FOUR

“Why did you do that, Tak?”

“Do what?”

I stood with Murakami under Angier glow from Impaler’s directional spotlights, watching the yakuza depart in an elegant black Expansemobile that Tanaseda had called in by phone. They ploughed away southward, leaving a broad, churned wake the colour of milky vomit.

“Why did you push him like that?”

I stared after the receding skimmer. “Because he’s scum. Because he’s a fucking criminal, and he won’t admit it.”

“Getting a little judgmental in your old age, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the southern outlook. You’re from Millsport, Tod, maybe you’re just standing too close to see it.”

He chuckled. “Okay. So what’s the view like from down here?”

“Same as it’s always been. The yakuza handing out their ancient-tradition-of-honour line to anyone who’ll listen, and meantime doing what? Working the same crabshit criminality as everybody else, but cosied up with the First Families into the bargain.”

“Not so much any more, looks like.”

“Ah, come on Tod. You know better than that. These guys have been in bed with Harlan and the rest of them since we fucking got here. Tanaseda might have to pay for this Qualgrist fuck-up he’s perpetrated, but the others will just make the right polite noises of regret and slide out from under. Back to the same illicit goods and genteel extortion line they’ve always trawled. And the First Families will welcome it with open arms because it’s one more thread in the net they’ve thrown over us all.”

“You know.” The laughter was still in his voice. “You’re beginning to sound like her.”

I looked round at him.

“Like who?”

“Like Quell, man. You sound like Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”

That sat between us for a couple of seconds. I turned away and stared out into the darkness over the Expanse. Perhaps recognising the unresolved tensions in the air between myself and Murakami, Jad had opted to leave us alone on the dock while the yakuza were still preparing to depart. The last I saw of her, she was boarding the Impaler with Vlad and the honour guard. Something about getting whisky coffee.

“Alright, then, Tod,” I said evenly. “How about you answer me this? Why did Tanaseda come running to you to put his life right?”

He pulled a face.

“You said it yourself, I’m Millsport born and bred. And the yak like to be plugged in at high level. They’ve been all over me since I came home on my first Corps furlough a hundred and whatever years ago. They think we’re old friends.”

“And are you?”

I felt the stare. Ignored it.

“I’m an Envoy, Tak,” he said finally. “You want to remember that.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m your friend.”

“I’m already sold, Tod. You don’t need to run this routine on me. I’ll take you in Segesvar’s back door on condition you help me fuck him up. Now what’s your end?”

He shrugged. “Aiura has to go down for breach of Protectorate directives. Double-sleeving an Envoy—”

“Ex-Envoy.”

“Speak for yourself. He’s never been officially discharged, even if you have. And even for keeping the copy in the first place, someone in the Harlan hierarchy has to pay. That’s erasure mandatory.”

There was an oddly ragged edge on his voice now. I looked more closely at him. The obvious truth hit home.

“You think they’ve got one of you too, don’t you?”

A wry grin. “There’s something special about you, you’d be the only one they copied? Come on, Tak. Does that make any sense? I checked the records. That intake, there were about a dozen of us recruited from Harlan’s World. Whoever decided on this brilliant little piece of insurance back then, they would have copied us all. We need Aiura alive long enough to tell us where in the Harlan datastacks we can find them.”

“Alright. What else?”

“You know what else,” he said quietly.

I went back to watching the Expanse. “I’m not going to help you slaughter Brasil and the others, Tod.”

“I’m not asking you to. For Virginia’s sake alone, I’ll try to avoid that. But someone has to pay the Bugs’ bill. Tak, they murdered Mitzi Harlan on the streets of Millsport!”

“Big loss. Across the globe, skullwalk editors weep.”

“Alright,” he said grimly. “They also killed fuck knows how many other incidental victims in the process. Law enforcement. Innocent bystanders. I’ve got the latitude to seal this operation up afterwards, marked regime unrest stabilised, no need for further deployment. But I’ve got to show scapegoats, or the Corps auditors are going to be all over it like livewire. You know that, you know how it works. Someone has to pay.”

“Or be seen to.”

“Or be seen to. But it needn’t be Virginia.”

“Ex-Envoy heads planetary rebellion. No, I can see how that wouldn’t play too well with the Corps’ public relations people.”

He stopped. Stared at me with sudden hostility.

“Is that really what you think of me?”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “No. I’m sorry.”

“I’m doing my best to nail this shut with a minimum of pain to people who matter, Tak. And you’re not helping.”

“I know.”

“I need someone for Mitzi Harlan’s murder, and I need a ringleader. Someone who’ll play well as the evil genius behind all this shit. Maybe a couple of others to bulk up the arrest list.”

If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.

Koi’s words in the beached and stalled-out hoverloader on Vchira Beach. The words and the flicker of passion around his face as he spoke them, the passion, perhaps, of a martyr who had missed his moment once before and did not intend to again.

Koi, ex-Black Brigade.

But Sierra Tres had said much the same thing while we hid in the channels and fallen ruins of Eltevedtem. And Brasil’s demeanour said it for him, all the time. Maybe what they all wanted was martyrdom in a cause older and greater and weightier than themselves.

I pushed my thoughts aside, derailed them before they could get where they were going.

“And Sylvie Oshima?” I asked.

“Well.” Another shrug. “As I understand it, she’s been contaminated by something from the Uncleared zones. So allowing we can salvage her from the firefight, we have her cleansed and then hand her back her life. Does that sound reasonable?”

“It sounds untenable.”

I remembered Sylvie talking about the command software aboard Guns for Guevara. No matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. If Koi could fight and die for a ghost, who knew what the neoQuellists would make of Sylvie Oshima, even after her headgear was wiped.

“Is it?”

“Come on, Tod. She’s iconic. Whatever is or isn’t inside her, she could be the focus for a whole new neoQuellist wave. The First Families will want her liquidated on principle.”

Murakami grinned fiercely.

“What the First Families want, and what they get from me are going to be two radically different things, Tak.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He slurred it, for mockery. “Because if they don’t cooperate fully, I’ll promise them an Envoy deployment at assault strength.”

“And if they call your bluff?”

“Tak, I’m an Envoy. Brutalising planetary regimes is what we do. They’ll fold like a fucking deck chair, and you know it. They’re going to be so fucking grateful for the escape clause, they’d have their own children queuing up to tongue my arse clean if I asked.”

I looked at him then, and for just a moment it was as if a door had blown open on my Envoy past. He stood there, still grinning in the glare from the Angier spots, and he could have been me. And I remembered what it had really been like. It wasn’t the belonging that came flooding back to me this time, it was the brutal power of Corps enablement. The liberating savagery that rose out of a bone-deep knowledge that you were feared.

That you were whispered of across the Settled Worlds and that even in the corridors of governance on Earth, the power brokers grew quiet at your name. It was a rush that came on like branded-supply tetrameth. Men and women who might wreck or simply remove from the balance sheet a hundred thousand lives with a gesture, those men and women could be taught fear again, and the instrument of that lesson was the Envoy Corps.

Was you.

I forced an answering smile.

“You’re charming, Tod. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

“Nope.”

And, out of nowhere, the smile stopped being forced. I laughed and it seemed to shake something loose inside me.

“Alright. Talk to me, you bastard. How do we do this?”

He gave me the clownish raised brows again. “I was hoping you’d tell me. You’re the one with the floorplans.”

“Yeah, I meant what’s our assault strength. You’re not planning to use—”

Murakami jerked a thumb at the bulk of Impaler.

“Our spiky-minded friends there? I certainly am.”

“Fuck, Tod, they’re a bunch of meth-head kids. The haiduci are going to shred them.”

He gestured dismissively. “Work with the tools to hand, Tak. You know how it is. They’re young and angry and cranked up on meth, just looking for someone to take it out on. They’ll keep Segesvar occupied long enough for us to get in and do the real damage.”

I glanced at my watch. “You planning to do this tonight?”

“Dawn tomorrow. We’re waiting on Aiura, and according to Tanaseda, she won’t get in until the early hours. Oh yeah.” He tipped his head back and nodded at the sky. “And there’s the weather.”

I followed his gaze. Thick, dark battlements of cloud were piled up overhead, toppling steadily westward across a fragmentary, orange-tinged sky where Hotei’s light still struggled to make itself felt. Daikoku had long ago drowned in a muffled glow on the horizon. And now that I noticed, there was a fresh breeze across the Expanse that carried the unmistakable smell of the sea.

“What about the weather?”

“It’s going to change.” Murakami sniffed. “That storm that was supposed to blow itself out in the southern Nurimono? Didn’t. And now it seems it’s picked up a scoop from some freak north-westerly run-on, and it’s hooking. It’s coming back around.”

Ebisu’s Eavesdrop.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m not sure, Tak. It’s a fucking weather forecast. But even if we don’t catch the full force of it, a bit of hard wind and horizontal rain wouldn’t go amiss, would it? Chaotic systems, just where we need them.”

“That,” I said carefully, “depends very much on how good a pilot your shaky friend Vlad turns out to be. You know what they call a hookback like this down here, don’t you?”

Murakami looked at me blankly.

“No. Rough luck?”

“No, they call it Ebisu’s Eavesdrop. After the fisherman ghost story?”

“Oh, right.”

This far south, Ebisu isn’t himself. In the north and equatorial regions of Harlan’s World, JapAmanglic cultural dominance makes him the folk god of the sea, patron of sailors and, generally speaking, a good-natured deity to have around. Saint Elmo is cheerily co-opted as an analogue or helper god, so as to include and not upset the more Christian-influenced residents. But in Kossuth, where the East European worker heritage that helped build the World is strong, this live and let live approach is not reciprocated. Ebisu emerges as a demonic submarine presence to scare children to bed with, a monster that in legend saints like Elmo must do battle with to protect the faithful.

“You remember how that story ends?” I asked.

“Sure. Ebisu bestows all these fantastic gifts on the fishermen in return for their hospitality, but he forgets his fishing rod, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So, uh, he comes back to get it and just as he’s about to knock he hears the fishermen running down his personal hygiene. His hands smell of fish, he doesn’t clean his teeth, his clothes are shabby. All that stuff you’re supposed to teach kids, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, I remember telling this stuff to Suki and Markus, back when they were small.” Murakami gaze grew distant, hazed out on the horizon and the gathering clouds there. “Got to be nearly half a century ago now. You believe that?”

“Finish the story, Tod.”

“Right. Well, uh, let’s see. Ebisu’s pissed off so he stalks in, grabs his rod and as he storms out again, all the gifts he’s given turn to rotting belaweed and dead fish in his wake. He plunges into the sea and the fishermen have crap catches for months afterwards. Moral of the tale—look after your personal hygiene, but even more important, kids, don’t talk about people behind their backs.”

He looked back at me.

“How’d I do?”

“Pretty good for fifty years on. But down here, they tell it a little different. See, Ebisu’s hideously ugly, tentacled and beaked and fanged, he’s a terrifying sight, and the fishermen have a hard time not just running away screaming. But they master their fear and offer him hospitality anyway, which you’re not supposed to do for a demon. So Ebisu gives them all sorts of gifts stolen from ships he’s sunk in the past, and then he leaves. The fishermen heave a massive sigh of relief and start talking it up, how monstrous he was, how terrifying, how smart they all were to get all these gifts out of him, and in the midst of it all back he comes for his trident.”

“Not a rod, then?”

“No, not scary enough I guess. It’s a massive, barbed trident in this version.”

“You’d think they’d have noticed when he left it behind, wouldn’t you?”

“Shut up. Ebisu overhears them bad-mouthing him, and slips away in a black fury, only to come back in the form of a huge storm that obliterates the whole village. Those not drowned get dragged down by his tentacles to an eternity of agony in a watery hell.”

“Lovely.”

“Yeah, similar moral. Don’t talk about people behind their backs but even more important don’t trust those filthy foreign deities from up north.” I lost my smile. “Last time I saw Ebisu’s Eavesdrop, I was still a kid. It came off the sea at the eastern end of Newpest and ripped the inland settlements apart for kilometres along the Expanse shoreline. Killed a hundred people without even trying. It drowned half the weed freighters in the inland harbour before anyone could power them up. The wind picked up the lightweight skimmers and threw them down the streets as far as Harlan Park. Round here, the Eavesdrop is very bad luck.”

“Well yeah, for anyone walking their dog in Harlan Park, it would have been.”

“I’m serious Tod. If this storm does come in and your methed-out pal Vlad can’t handle his helm, we’re likely to find ourselves upside down and trying to breathe belaweed before we get anywhere near Segesvar’s place.”

Murakami frowned a little.

“Let me worry about Vlad,” he said. “You just concentrate on building us an assault plan that works.”

I nodded.

“Right. An assault plan that works on the premier haiduci stronghold in the southern hemisphere, using teenage junkies for shock troops, and a hookback storm for landing cover. By dawn. Sure. How hard can it be?”

The frown again for a moment, then, suddenly, he laughed.

“Now you put it like that, I can hardly wait.” He clapped me on the shoulder and wandered off towards the pirate hoverloader, voice trailing back to me. “I’ll go talk to Vlad now. Going to be one for the annals, Tak. You’ll see. I’ve got a feeling about it. Envoy intuition.”

“Right.”

And out at the horizon, thunder rolled back and forth as if trapped in the narrow space between the cloud base and the ground.

Ebisu, back for his trident, and not much liking what he’d just heard.

FORTY-FIVE

Dawn was still little more than a rinsed-out grey splash thrown over the looming black mass of the stormfront when Impaler cast off her moorings and blasted out across the Expanse. At assault speed, she made a noise as if she were shaking herself to pieces, but as we headed into the storm even that faded before the shriek of the wind and the metallic drumming of rain on her armoured flanks. The forward viewports of the bridge were a shattering mass of water through which heavy-duty wipers flogged with an overworked electronic whining. Dimly, you could see the normally sluggish waters of the Expanse whipped into waves. Ebisu’s Eavesdrop had delivered to expectations.

“Like Kasengo all over again,” shouted Murakami, wet-faced and grinning as he squeezed in through the door that led out to the observation deck. His clothes were drenched. Behind him, the wind screamed, grabbed at the doorframe and tried to follow him inside. He fought it off with an effort and slammed the door. Storm autolocks engaged with a solid clunk.

“Visibility’s dropping through the floor. These guys are never going to know what hit them.”

“Then it’ll be nothing like Kasengo,” I said irritably, remembering. My eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. “Those guys were expecting us.”

“Yeah, true.” He raked water out of his hair with both hands and shook it off his fingers onto the floor. “But we still trashed them.”

“Watch that drift,” said Vlad to his helmsman. There was a curious new tone to his voice, an authority I hadn’t seen before, and the worst of his twitchiness seemed to have damped down. “We’re riding the wind here, not giving in to it. Lean on her.”

“Leaning.”

The hoverloader quivered palpably with the manoeuvre. The deck thrummed underfoot. Rain made a new, furious sound on the roof and viewports as our angle of entry to the storm shifted.

“That’s it,” Vlad said serenely. “Hold her like that.”

I stayed on the bridge for a while longer, then nodded at Murakami and slipped down the companionway to the cabin decks. I moved aft, hands braced on the corridor walls to beat the occasional lurches in the hover loader’s stability. Once or twice, crew members appeared and slid past me in the cramped space with practised ease. The air was hot and sticky. A couple of cabins along, I glanced sideways at an opened door and saw one of Vlad’s young pirates, stripped to the waist and bent over unfamiliar modules of hardware on the floor. I took in large, well-shaped breasts, the sheen of sweat on her flesh under harsh white light, short-cut hair damp on the nape of her neck. Then she realised I was there and straightened up.

She braced herself with one hand on the cabin wall, folded the other arm across her breasts and met my eyes with a tense glare that I guessed was either meth comedown or combat nerves.

“Got a problem, sam?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, mind was on something else.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck off.”

The cabin door sliced shut. I sighed.

Fair enough.

I found Jad looking similarly tense, but fully dressed. She was seated on the upper of the twin bunks in the cabin we’d been allocated, shard blaster stripped of its magazine and laid under the arch of one booted leg. In her hands were the gleaming halves of a solid-load pistol that I didn’t remember her having before.

I swung into the lower bunk.

“What you got there?”

“Kalashnikov electromag,” she said. “One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.”

“Making friends already, huh?” An accountable sadness hit me as I spoke the words. Maybe something to do with the twin sibling pheromones coming off the Eishundo sleeves. “Wonder where he stole it from.”

“Who says it had to be stolen?”

“I do. These guys are pirates.” I stuck a hand up to her bunk. “Come on, let me have a look at it.”

She snapped the weapon back together and dropped it into my palm. I held it in front of my eyes and nodded. The Kal EM range were famed throughout the Settled Worlds as the silent sidearm of choice, and this was a state-of-the-art model. I grunted and handed it back up.

“Yeah. Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No methhead pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun. He nicked it. Probably killed the owner too. Got to watch the company you keep, Jad.”

“Man, you’re cheerful this morning. Didn’t you get any sleep?”

“The way you were snoring up there? What do you think?”

No reply. I grunted again and drifted into the memories Murakami had stirred up. Kasengo, undistinguished little port town in the barely settled southern hemisphere of Nkrumah’s Land, recently garrisoned with government troops as the political climate worsened and relations with the

Protectorate deteriorated. Kasengo, for reasons best known to the locals, had stellar-range hypercast capacity, and the government of Nkrumah’s Land were worried that the UN military might like access to that capacity.

They were right to worry.

We’d come in quietly at hypercast stations around the globe over the previous six months, while everyone was still pretending that diplomacy was a viable option. By the time Envoy Command ordered the strike on Kasengo, we were as adjusted to Nkrumah’s Land as any of its hundred million fifth generation colonists. While our deep-cover teams fomented riots on the streets of cities in the north, Murakami and I gathered a small tactical squad and disappeared south. The idea was to eliminate the garrison while they slept and seize the needlecast facilities the following morning. Something went wrong, information leaked, and we arrived to find the hypercast station heavily defended.

There was no time to draw fresh plans. The same leak that had alerted the Kasengo garrison meant that reinforcements would be on their way.

In the midst of a freezing rainstorm, we hit the station in stealth suits and grav packs, sewing the sky around us with tinsel to simulate massive numbers. In the confusion of the storm, the ruse worked like a dream. The garrison were largely conscripted youngsters with a few seasoned NCOs riding herd. Ten minutes into the firefight, they broke and scattered through the rain-slashed streets in frantic, retreating knots. We chased, isolated, mopped them up. Some few went down fighting, most were taken alive and locked up.

Later, we used their bodies to sleeve the first wave of Envoy heavy assault.

I closed my eyes.

“Micky?” Jad’s voice from the bunk above.

“Takeshi.”

“Whatever. Let’s stick with Micky, huh?”

“Alright.”

“You think that fuck Anton’s going to be there today?”

I levered my eyes open again. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Tanaseda seemed to think so. Looks like Kovacs is still using him anyway, maybe as a safeguard. If no one’s sure what to expect from Sylvie or the thing she’s carrying, might be comforting to have another command head around.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.” She paused. Then, just as my eyes were sliding closed once more. “It doesn’t bother you, talking about yourself that way. Knowing he’s out there?”

“Of course it bothers me.” I yawned cavernously. “I’m going to kill the little fuck.”

Silence. I let my eyelids shutter themselves.

“So Micky.”

“What?”

“If Anton is there?”

I rolled my eyes at the bunk above me. “Yes?”

“If he’s there, I want that motherfucker. You have to shoot him, you wreck his legs or something. He’s mine.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it, Micky.”

“So do I,” I mumbled, tilting ponderously away under the weight of deferred sleep. “Kill whoever you fucking like, Jad.”

Kill whoever you fucking like.

It could have been a mission statement for the raid.

We hit the farm at ramming speed. Garbled distress broadcasts got us close enough that any long-range weaponry Segesvar had would be useless.

Vlad’s helmsman ran a vector that looked like driven before the storm but was actually a high-speed controlled swerve. By the time the haiduci realised what was going on, Impaler was upon them. She smashed in through the panther pens, crushing webbing barriers and the old wooden jetties of the original baling station, unstoppable, ripping loose the planking, demolishing decayed antique walls, carrying the growing mass of piled-up wreckage forward on her armoured nose.

Look, I told Murakami and Vlad the night before, there is no subtle way to do this. And Vlad’s eyes lit up with meth-fired enthusiasm.

Impaler ploughed to a clanking, grinding halt amidst the half submerged wet-bunker modules. Her decks were canted steeply to the right, and down on the debarkation level, a dozen collision alerts shrilled hysterically in my ears as the hatches on that side blew wide open on explosive bolts.

Boarding ramps dropped like bombs, livewire security lines at their tips, writhing and shredding into evercrete for purchase. Dully through the hull, I heard the clang and whirr of the major grapple lines firing. Impaler caught and clung fast.

It was a system once designed only for emergency use, but the pirates had rewired every aspect of their vessel for fast assault, boarding and battery. Only the machine mind that ran it all had been left out of the loop, and still thought we were a ship in crisis.

The weather met us on the ramp. Rain and wind rushed me, slapped at my face, shoved at me from odd angles. Vlad’s assault team ran bellowing into the midst of it. I glanced once at Murakami, shook my head, and then followed. Maybe they had the right idea—with Impaler snagged fast amidst the damage she’d just created, there was no way back for anybody that didn’t involve either winning or dying.

Gunfire started in the grey swirl of the storm. Hiss, sizzle of beam weapons, the boom and bark of slug guns. The beams showed pale blue and yellow in the murk. A distant ripple of thunder across the sky and pale lightning seemed to respond. Someone screamed and fell somewhere up ahead. Indistinct yelling. I cleared the end of the ramp, skidded on the bulge of a wet-bunker module, gained balance with the Eishundo sleeve and leapt forward. Down into the shallow slosh of water between modules, up the bubbled slope of the next. The surface was gritty and gave good purchase. Peripheral vision told me I was the apex of a wedge, Jad on my left flank, Murakami on my right with a plasmafrag gun.

I cranked the neurachem and spotted a maintenance ladder ahead, three of Vlad’s pirates pinned down at the base by gunfire from the dockside above. The sprawled body of a comrade floated against the nearest wet bunker module, still steaming from face and chest where the blaster fire had scorched the life from its owner.

I flung myself towards the ladder with wincefish abandon.

“Jad!”

“Yeah-go!”

Like being back in the Uncleared. Vestiges of Slipin attunement, maybe some twin-like affinity, care of Eishundo. I sprinted flat out. Behind me the shard blaster spoke—spiteful rushing whine in the rain and the edge of the dock exploded in a hail of fragments. More screams. I reached the ladder about the same moment the pirates realised they were no longer pinned down. Stamped my way hurriedly up it, Rapsodia stowed.

At the top, there were bodies, torn and bloodied from the shard fire, and one of Segesvar’s men, injured but still on his feet. He spat and lurched at me with a knife. I twisted aside, locked out the knife arm and threw him off the dock. Short scream, lost in the storm.

Crouch and search, Rapsodia out and sweeping in the poor visibility, while the others came up behind me. Rain smashed down and made a million little geysers back off the evercrete surface. I blinked it out of my eyes.

The dock was clear.

Murakami clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, not bad for a retired man.”

I snorted. “Someone’s got to show you how. Come on, this way.”

We stalked along the dock in the rain, found the entrance I wanted and slipped inside, one at a time. The sudden relief from the force of the storm was shocking, almost like silence. We stood dripping water on the plastic floor of a short corridor set with familiar, heavy, portholed metal doors.

Thunder growled outside. I peered through the glass of a door just to be sure, and saw a room of blank-faced metal cabinets. Cold storage for the panther feed and, occasionally, the corpses of Segesvar’s enemies. At the end of the corridor, a narrow stairwell led down to the crude resleeving unit and veterinary section for the panthers.

I nodded to the stairs.

“Down there. Three levels and we’re in the wet-bunker complex.”

The pirates went in the van, noisy and enthusiastic. Meth-wired as they were, and not a little pissed off with having to follow me up the ladder, it would have been hard to dissuade them. Murakami shrugged and didn’t try. They clattered down the stairwell at speed, and ran straight into an ambush at the bottom.

We were a flight of stairs behind, moving with undrugged caution, and even there I felt the splashback from the blasters scorch my face and hands.

Cacophony of high, sudden shrieks as the pirates caught fire and died as human torches. One of them made three blundering steps back up out of the inferno, flame-winged arms raised imploringly towards us. His melted face was less than a metre from mine when he collapsed, hissing and smoking, on the cold steel stairs below.

Murakami hurled an ultravibe grenade down the well and it bounced once metallically before the familiar cluttering scream kicked in. In the confined space it was deafening. We slapped palms to ears in unison. If anybody down there screamed when it killed them, their deaths were inaudible.

We waited for a second after the grenade died, then Murakami fired the plasmafrag rifle downward. There was no reaction. I crept down past the blackened, cooling corpses of the pirates, gagging at the stench. Peered past the inward-curled, despairing limbs of the one who’d met the brunt of the fire, and saw an empty corridor. Yellow cream walls, floor and ceiling, brilliantly lit with overhead strips of inlaid illuminum. Close to the foot of the stairwell, everything was painted with broad swathes of blood and clotted tissue.

“Clear.”

We picked our way through the gore and moved cautiously up the corridor, into the heart of the wet-bunker’s base levels. Tanaseda hadn’t known where exactly the captives would be held—the haiduci were twitchy and aggressive about allowing the yakuza a presence in Kossuth in the first place. Precarious in his new role of penitent failed blackmailer, Tanaseda had still insisted, on his own admission because he’d hoped to retrieve the whereabouts of Yukio Hirayasu’s stack from me by torture or extortion and thus cut his loss of face, at least among his own colleagues. Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka, for some byzantine reason or other, agreed and in the end, it was her pressure on Segesvar that forged the diplomatic cooperation between yakuza and haiduci. Tanaseda had been welcomed formally by Segesvar himself, and then been told in no uncertain terms that he’d best find himself accommodation in Newpest or Sourcetown, stay away from the farm unless specifically summoned and keep his men on a tight leash. He’d certainly not been given a tour of the premises.

But really, there was only one secure place in the complex for people you didn’t want dead yet. I’d seen it a couple of times on previous visits, had once even watched some doomed gambling junkie conveyed there while Segesvar thought about how exactly to make an example of him. If you wanted to lock a man up on the farm, you put him where even a monster couldn’t break free. You locked him in the panther cells.

We paused at a crossways, where ventilation systems gaped open above us. Faintly, down the conduits, came the sounds of ongoing battle. I gestured left, murmuring.

“Down there. The panther cells are all on the right at the next turn, they open onto tunnels that lead directly into the pens. Segesvar converted a couple of them for human holding. Got to be one of those.”

“Alright, then.”

We picked up the pace again, took the right turn, and then I heard the smooth, solid hum of one of the doors on the cells sliding down into the floor. Footsteps and urgent voices beyond. Segesvar and Aiura, and a third voice I’d heard before but couldn’t place. I clamped down on the savage spurt of joy, flattened myself to the wall and waved Jad and Murakami back.

Aiura, compressed rage as I tuned in.

“…really expect me to be impressed by this?”

“Don’t you hand me that shit,” snapped Segesvar. “This is that slant-eyed yak fuck you insisted on bringing aboard. I told you—”

“Somehow, Segesvar-san, I do not think—”

“And don’t fucking call me that either. This is Kossuth, not the fucking north. Have a bit of cultural sensitivity, why don’t you. Anton, you sure there’s no intrusion ‘cast going down?”

And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.

“Nothing. This is strictly—”

I should have seen it coming.

I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly-lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—

Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.

“Anton, you motherless fuck!”

I came off the wall, spinning to cover them all with the Rapsodia.

Too late.

I took in a glimpse of the three of them, gaping in shock. Segesvar met my eyes and flinched. Jad stood braced, shard gun riding her hip, levelled.

Anton saw and reacted, deCom swift. He seized Aiura Harlan Tsuruoka by the shoulders and hurled her in front of him. The shard gun coughed.

The Harlan security exec screa—

—and came apart from shoulders to waist as the monomol swarm ripped through her. Blood and tissue exploded through the air around us, splattered me, blinded me—

In the time it took me to wipe my eyes, they were both gone. Back through the cell they’d come out of, and the tunnel beyond. What remained of Aiura lay on the floor in three pieces and puddles of gore.

“Jad, what the fuck are you playing at?” I yelled.

She wiped her face, smearing blood. “Told you I’d get him.”

I grabbed at calm. Stabbed a finger at the carnage around our feet. “You didn’t get him, Jad. He’s gone.” Calm failed me, collapsed catastrophically before focusless fury. “How could you be so fucking stupid. He’s fucking gone.”

“Then I’ll fucking catch him up.”

“No, we nee—”

But she was already moving again, across the opened cell at a fast deCom lope. Ducking into the tunnel.

“Nice going, Tak,” said Murakami sardonically. “Command presence. I like that.”

“Shut up, Tod. Just find the monitor room, check the cells. They’re all around here somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I was backing off, moving before I finished speaking. Sprinting again, after Jad, after Segesvar.

After something.

FORTY-SIX

The tunnel came out in a fight pit. Steep, sloping evercrete sides, ten metres tall and torn ragged for half their height by decades of swamp panthers trying to claw their way out. Railed spectator space around the top, all open to a sky clogged with a fast-moving stampede of greenish cloud cover. It was impossible to look directly up in the rain. Thirty centimetres of thick mud in the bottom of the pit, now pounded into brown sludge by the downpour. The drainage vents in the walls couldn’t keep up.

I squinted through the water in the air and on my face, spotted Jad halfway up the narrow maintenance ladder cut into one corner of the pit.

Bawled at her over the sound of the storm. “Jad! Fucking wait!”

She paused, hanging off the ladder rung, shard blaster pointing downward.

Then waved and went on climbing.

I cursed, stowed the Rapsodia and went after her up the ladder. Rain cascaded down the walls past me and drummed on my head. I seemed to hear blasterfire somewhere above.

When I got to the top, a hand came down and grasped my wrist. I jolted with shock and and looked up to see Jad peering down at me.

“Stay low,” she called. “They’re up here.”

Cautiously, I got my head above the level of the pit and looked out across the network of gantries and spectator galleries that criss-crossed the fight pits. Thick curtains of rain skirled across the view. At more than ten metres, visibility faded to grey, at twenty it was gone. Somewhere on the other side of the farm, I could hear the firefight still raging, but here there was only the storm. Jad lay flat on her belly at the edge of the pit. She saw me cast about and leaned closer.

“They split up,” she shouted in my ear. “Anton’s heading for the moorage space on the far side. My guess is he’s looking for a ride out, or maybe the other you to give him some backup. The other guy cut back through the pens over there, looks like he wants to fight. Fired on me just now.”

I nodded. “Alright, you get after Anton, I’ll take care of Segesvar. I’ll cover you when you move.”

“Done.”

I grabbed her shoulder as she rolled over. Pulled her back for a moment.

“Jad, you just be fucking careful. If you run into me out there—”

Her teeth split in a grin, and the rain trickled into her teeth.

“Then I’ll waste him for you at no extra charge.”

I joined her on the flat space of the wallwalk, drew the Rapsodia and dialled it to tight dispersal, maximum range. I squirmed about and settled into a half-reclining crouch.

“Scan up!”

She gathered herself.

“Go!”

She sprinted away from me, along the rail, onto a connecting gantry and into the murk. Off to the right, a blaster bolt split the curtain of rain. I triggered the shard pistol in reflex, but reckoned it wasn’t close enough.

Forty to fifty metres, the armourer in Tekitomura had said, but it helped if you could see what you were shooting at.

So—

I stood up. Bellowed into the storm.

“Hey Rad! You listening? I’m coming to fucking kill you!”

No reply. But no blaster fire either. I moved warily forward, along the side of the pit gallery, trying to estimate Segesvar’s position.

The fight pits were blunt oval arenas sunk directly into the silt bed of the Expanse, deeper inside than the surrounding waters by about a metre.

There were nine of them pressed up against each other in rows of three, thick evercrete walls between topped with interlinked galleries where spectators could stand at the rail and watch the panthers rip each other apart at a safe distance below. Steel mesh spectator walkways were laid corner to corner of each pit to provide much-needed extra space for popular fights. On more than one occasion, I’d seen the galleries packed five deep all around and the cross gantries creaking with the weight of crowds craning to see a death.

The overall honeycomb structure the nine pits formed rose about five metres out of the shallow waters of the Expanse and backed onto the low lying bubbles of the wet bunker complex at one side. Adjacent to this edge of the pits and criss-crossed with more gantried service walkways, were the rows of smaller feeding pens and long rectangular exercise runs that Impaler had smashed through on her way into the farm. As near as I could make out, it was from the edge of this mangled wreckage that the blaster had fired.

“You hear me Rad, you piece of shit?”

The blaster crashed again. The beam scorched past me, and I hit the evercrete floor, splashing water. Segesvar’s voice rolled past overhead.

“That’s close enough, I think, Tak.”

“Suit yourself,” I shouted back. “It’s all over bar the cleaning up anyway.”

“Really? Not got much faith in yourself, have you? He’s over on the new dock side right now, repelling your pirate friends. He’ll throw them back into the Expanse or feed them to the panthers. Can’t you hear?”

I listened and caught the sounds of battle again. Blasterfire and the odd agonised scream. Impossible to know how it was going for anyone, but my own misgivings about Vlad and his meth-head crew came back to me. I grimaced.

“Quite smitten, aren’t we!” I yelled. “What’s the matter, you and him been spending time down in the grav gym? Been poking either end of your favourite whore together?”

“Fuck you, Kovacs. At least he still knows how to have fun.”

His voice sounded close, even in the storm. I raised myself slightly and started to crawl along the gallery floor. Get a little closer.

“Right. And that was worth selling me out for?”

“I haven’t sold you out.” The trawler winch laugh rattled out at me. “I’ve traded you in on a better version. I’m going to do what’s right by this guy instead of you. Because this fucking guy still remembers where he’s from.”

A little closer. Drag yourself a metre at a time through the hammering rain and three centimetres of standing water on the walkways. Away from one pit, around a second. Stay low. Don’t let the hate and anger put you on your feet just yet. Try to push him into making a mistake.

“So does he remember you mewling and crawling in a back alley with your fucking thigh ripped open, Rad? Does he fucking remember that?”

“Yeah, he does. But you know what?” Segesvar’s voice scaled upward.

Must have hit a nerve. “He just doesn’t break my balls about it all the fucking time. And he doesn’t milk it to take fucking liberties with my finances.”

A little closer. I pitched my own voice amused.

“Yeah, and he’s plugged you in with the First Families too. Which is what this is really about, right? You’ve sold out to a bunch of fucking aristos, Rad. Just like the fucking yakuza. You’ll be moving to Millsport next.”

“Hey, fuck you Kovacs!”

The fury came accompanied by another blaster bolt, but it was nowhere close. I grinned in the rain and dialled the Rapsodia up to maximum dispersal. Pressed myself up out of the water. Cranked the neurachem.

“And I’m the one who’s forgotten where he’s from? Come on, Rad. You’ll be wearing a slit-eyed sleeve before you know it.”

Close enough.

“Hey fuck—”

I rose to my feet and hurled myself forward. His voice cued me in, neurachem vision did the rest. I spotted him crouched at the far side of one of the feeding pens, part shielded by the steel mesh side of a bridging walkway. The Rapsodia spewed monomol fragments from my fist as I ran round the oval walkway of the fight pit. No time for better aim, just have to hope that—

He yelped and I saw him stagger, clutching at an arm. Savage joy coursed through me, peeled my lips back from my teeth. I fired again and he either collapsed or dived for cover. I leapt the rail between the gallery I was on and the feeding pen beyond. Nearly tripped—didn’t. Swayed back on balance and made a split-second decision. I couldn’t go round on the wall. If Segesvar was still alive, he’d be back on his feet in the time it took, he’d cook me with the blaster. The walkway was a straight sprint, half a dozen metres across the top of the pen. I hit it running.

The metal beneath my feet tilted sickeningly.

Down in the pen, something leapt and snarled. The sea-and-rotting flesh stink of the panther’s breath came boiling up at me.

Later, I would have time to understand: the feeding pen had taken a glancing blow from Impaler’s arrival and the evercrete on the side where Segesvar waited had fractured open. That end of the walkway hung by nothing more than bolts ripped halfway loose of their mountings. And somehow, from some similar damage elsewhere in the pen complex, one of the swamp panthers was out.

I was still two metres out from the end of the walkway when the bolts tore all the way out. Eishundo reflex threw me forward. I lost the Rapsodia, grabbed at the edge of the pen with both hands. The walkway dropped out from under me. My palms closed on rain-drenched evercrete.

One hand slipped. The gekko grip in the other held me up. Somewhere below me, the swamp panther struck sparks from the fallen gantry with its talons, then fell back with a shrill howl. I scrabbled for purchase with my other hand.

Segesvar’s head appeared over the lip of the pen wall. He was pale and there was blood soaking through the right arm of his jacket, but he grinned when he saw me.

“Well, fucking well,” he said, almost conversationally. “My old self righteous fucking friend Takeshi Kovacs.”

I heaved sideways desperately. Got a heel hooked over the edge of the pen. Segesvar saw it and limped closer.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, and kicked my foot away. I swung out again, barely retaining grip with both hands. He stood above me and stared down for a moment. Then he looked away across the fight pits, and nodded with vague satisfaction. The rain hammered down around us.

“So for once I’m looking down on you.”

I panted. “Oh, fuck off.”

“You know that panther down there might even be one of your religious friends. That’d be ironic, eh?”

“Just get on with it, Rad. You’re a sell-out piece of shit and nothing you do here is going to prove any different.”

“That’s right, Takeshi. Take the fucking moral high ground.” His face contorted, and for a moment I thought he was going to kick my hands away there and then. “Like you always do. Oh, Radul’s a fucking criminal, Radul can’t handle himself, I had to save Radul’s fucking life once. You been doing it since you slimed Yvonna away from me, and you never fucking change?”

I gaped up at him in the rain, the drop below me almost forgotten. Spat water out of my mouth.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You know fucking well what I’m talking about! Watanabe’s that summer, Yvonna Vasarely, with the green eyes.”

Memory flared with the name. Hirata’s Reef, the long-limbed silhouette above me. A sea-wet, salt-tasting body on damp rubber suits.

Hang on tight.

“I.” I shook my head numbly. “I thought she was called Eva.”

“You see, you fucking see.” It came seething up out of him like pus, like poison contained too long. His face distorted with rage. “You didn’t give a shit about her, she was just another nameless fuck for you.”

For long moments, my past swept back over me like surf. The Eishundo sleeve took over and I hung in a lit tunnel of kaleidoscope images from that summer. Out on the deck at Watanabe’s. The heat, pressing down from a leaden sky. Scant breeze across the Expanse, not enough to stir the heavy mirrored windchimes. Flesh slick with sweat beneath clothing, beaded with it where you could see. Languid talk and laughter, the acrid aroma of seahemp on the air. The green-eyed girl.

“That’s two hundred fucking years ago, Rad. And you weren’t even talking to her most of the time. You were snorting meth out of Malgazorta Bukovski’s cleavage, as per fucking usual.”

“I didn’t know how to. She was.” He locked up. “I fucking cared about her, you cunt.”

At first I couldn’t identify the noise that came out of me. It could have been a choked cough with the rain that forced its way down my throat every time I opened my mouth. It felt a little like a sob, a tiny wrenching sense of something coming loose inside. A slippage, a loss.

But it wasn’t.

It was laughter.

It came up through me after the first spluttering cough like warmth, demanding space in my chest and a way out. It blew the water out of my mouth, and I couldn’t stop it.

“Stop laughing, you fuck.”

I couldn’t stop. I giggled. Fresh energy curled up my arms with the unlooked-for hilarity, into my gekko hands, new tensile strength down the length of every finger.

“You stupid bastard, Rad. She was Newpest money, she wasn’t ever going to waste herself on street like us. She went off to study in Millsport that autumn and I never saw her again. She told me I’d never see her again. Said not to get hung up about it, we’d had fun but it wasn’t our lives.”

Barely conscious of what I was doing, I found I’d started to heave myself up to the lip of the pen while he stared at me. The hard evercrete edge of it against my chest. Panting as I talked. “You really think. You’d ever have got near someone like that, Rad? Thought she’d have your. Babies, and sit on Spekny Wharf with the other gang wives? Waiting for you to come home. Fried from Watanabe’s at dawn? I mean.” Between grunts, the laughter came bubbling up again. “How fucking desperate would a woman, any woman, have to be for that?”

“Fuck you!” he screamed, and kicked me in the face.

I suppose I knew it was coming. I was certainly pushing him hard enough. But it all seemed suddenly very distant and unimportant alongside the glittery bright images of that summer. And anyway, it was the Eishundo sleeve, not me.

My left hand lashed out. Grabbed his leg round the calf as it swung back from the kick. Blood gouted from my nose. The gekko grip locked. I yanked back savagely and he did a ridiculous little one-legged jig at the edge of the pen. He looked down at me, face working.

I fell, and dragged him down.

It wasn’t far to fall. The sides of the pen sloped the same way as the fight pits and the fallen walkway had jammed itself halfway down the evercrete wall, almost on an even keel. I hit the meshed metal and Segesvar landed on top of me. I lost the air in my lungs. The walkway juddered and scraped down another half metre. Below us, the panther went crazy, flailing at the rail, trying to tear it down to the floor of the pen. It could smell the blood streaming from my broken nose.

Segesvar squirmed around, fury still in his eyes. I threw a punch. He smothered it. Snarling monosyllables through gritted teeth, he got his injured arm across my throat and leaned on it. It ripped a cry out of him, but he never eased the pressure for a moment. The panther slammed into the side of the fallen gantry, blasting the stink of its breath through the mesh at my side. I saw one raging eye, obliterated by sparks as the talons tore at the metal. It shrilled and slobbered at us like something insane.

Maybe it was.

I kicked and flailed, but Segesvar had me locked down. Nearly two centuries of street violence stored up, he didn’t lose this kind of fight. He glared down at me and the hate fed him strength to beat the pain of the shardblast damage in his arm. I got one arm free and tried again to punch him in the throat, but he had that covered too. An elbow block and my fingers barely grazed the side of his face. Then he held my arm locked there and settled his weight harder onto the injured arm that was choking me.

I raised my head and bit through the jacket into the shredded flesh of his forearm. Blood welled up in the cloth and filled my mouth. He screamed, and punched me in the side of the head with his other arm. The pressure on my throat began to tell—I couldn’t breathe any more. The panther battered at the metal gantrywork, and it shifted. I slipped fractionally sideways.

Used the shift.

Forced my open palm and fingers flat against the side of his face.

Dragged downward hard.

The gekko gene spines bit and gripped the skin. Where the pads at the tips and the base of my fingers pressed hardest, Segesvar’s face tore open.

Street-fighter instinct had screwed his eyes shut as I grabbed him, but it did no good. The grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve. He screamed, gut deep. A sudden spray of blood squirted red against the grey of the rain, splattered warm on my face. He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood. I yelled and came after him, hooked a punch into the undamaged side of his face that threw him staggering sideways against the walkway rail.

He sprawled there for a second, left hand raised dizzily to block me, right fist curled tight despite the damage the arm had taken.

And the swamp panther took him down.

There and gone. It was a blur of mane and mantle, forelimb slash and beakgape. Its claws hooked into him at shoulder height and hauled him down off the walkway like a rag doll. He screamed once, and then I heard a single, savage crunch as the beak snapped closed. I didn’t see, but it probably bit him in half there and then.

For what must have been a full minute I stood swaying on the canted walkway, listening to the sound of flesh being torn apart and swallowed, bones being snapped. Finally, I staggered to the rail and made myself look.

I was too late. Nothing in the carnage around the feeding panther looked like it had ever been remotely associated with a human body.

Rain was already sluicing the worst of the blood away.

Swamp panthers aren’t very bright. Fed, this one showed little or no interest in my continuing existence over its head. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Rapsodia, couldn’t see it and so set about getting out of the pen. With the multiple fractures Impaler’s arrival had put in the evercrete wall, it wasn’t too difficult. I used the widest crack for leverage, jammed in my feet and hauled myself up hand over hand. With the exception of a bad scare when a chunk of evercrete came away in my hand at the top, it was a swift and uneventful climb. On the way up, something in the Eishundo system gradually stopped my nose bleeding.

I stood at the top and listened for the sounds of battle. Heard nothing above the storm, and even that seemed quieter. The fighting was either done, or down to skulk-and-stalk. Apparently I’d underestimated Vlad and his crew.

Yeah, or the haiduci.

Time to find out which.

I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much any more about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt.

We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously levelled.

I found the others a half dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor, the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognised but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amidst the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped round, levelled the blaster and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head round the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

“Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?”

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.

“Beats me. Looks like we got here too late. You know them?”

“Where’s Murakami?”

He gestured back the way he’d come. “Over the far side, up on the parking dock. He sent me to find you, case you needed help. Fighting’s mostly done, you know. Just mopping up and some good old piracy to do now.” He grinned again. “Time to get paid. Come on, this way.”

Numbly, I followed him. We crossed the wet bunker, through corridors marked with the signs of recent battle, blaster-charred walls and ugly splashes of shattered human tissue, the odd sprawled corpse and once an absurdly well-dressed middle-aged man sitting on the floor staring in catatonic disbelief at his shattered legs sticking straight out in front of him. He must have been flushed from the casino or the brothel when the raid started, must have fled down into the bunker complex and got caught in the crossfire. As we reached him, he raised both arms weakly towards us, and Vlad shot him with the plasmafrag. We left him with steam curling up from the massive hole through his chest and climbed up an access ladder into the body of the old baling station.

Out on the parking dock, there was similar carnage. Crumpled bodies were strewn across the wharf and in amongst the moored skimmers. Here and there, small flames burned where blasterfire had found something more readily flammable than human flesh and bone. Smoke drifted through the rain. The wind was definitely dying down.

Murakami was by the water, knelt beside a slumped Virginia Vidaura and talking urgently to her. One hand cradled the side of her face. A couple of Vlad’s pirates stood around, arguing amiably, with their weapons slung over their shoulders. They were all drenched, but apparently unharmed.

Across the forward carapace of a green-painted Expansemobile moored nearby, Anton’s body.

He lay head down, eyes frozen open, rainbow command-head hair trailing down almost to the water. There was a hole you could have put your head through where his chest and stomach had been. It looked as if Jad had got him dead centre from behind with the shard blaster’s focus dialled up to tight. The blaster itself lay discarded on the dock amidst pools of blood. Of Jad, there was no sign.

Murakami saw us coming and let go of Vidaura’s face. He picked up the shard blaster and held it out to me in both hands. The magazine was ejected, the breech clear. It had been fired empty, then discarded. He shook his head.

“We’ve looked for her, but there’s nothing. Col here says he thinks he saw her go into the water. Shot from the wall up there. Could be she was only winged but in this shit.” He gestured at the weather. “No way to tell ‘til we sweep for bodies. Storm’s moving out westward, dying off. We can look then.”

I stared down at Virginia Vidaura. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but she looked to be semi-conscious, head lolling. I turned back to Murakami.

“What the fuck is—”

And the shard blaster butt came up and hit me in the head.

White fire, disbelief. A brand new nosebleed.

Who—

I staggered, gaped, fell down.

Murakami stood over me. He tossed the shard blaster away and pulled a neat little stunner from his belt.

“Sorry, Tak.”

Shot me with it.

FORTY-SEVEN

At the end of a very long, darkened corridor, there’s a woman waiting for me. I’m trying to hurry, but my clothes are waterlogged and heavy, and the corridor itself is canted at an angle and almost knee-deep in viscous stuff that I’d think was congealing blood except it stinks of belaweed. I flounder forward on the submerged, tilted floor, but the open doorway doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Got a problem, sam?

I crank the neurachem, but something’s wrong with the bioware because what I can see is like an ultradistant sniperscope image. I only have to twitch and it dances about all over the place, hurting my eyes when they try to keep focus. Half the time the woman is Vlad’s well-endowed pirate comrade, stripped to the waist and bent over the modules of unfamiliar equipment on the floor of her cabin. Long, large breasts hanging like fruit—I can feel the roof of my mouth aching to suck in one of the blunt, darkened nipples. Then, just when I think I’ve got a grip on the view, it slides away and becomes a tiny kitchen with handpainted blinds that block out the Kossuth sunlight. There’s a woman there too, also stripped to the waist, but it isn’t the same one because I know her.

The scope wobbles again. My eyes stray to the hardware on the floor. Matt grey impact-resistant casings, lustrous black discs where datacoils will spring up when activated. The logo on each module is inscribed in ideographic characters that I recognise, though I don’t currently have a reading knowledge of either Hun Home or Earth Chinese. Tseng Psychographics. It’s a name I’ve seen around battlefields and psychosurgical recovery units in the recent past, a new name. A new star in the rarified constellation of military brand names, a name and a brand that only very well-funded organisations can afford.

What you got there?

Kalashnikov electromag. One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.

Wonder where he stole it from.

Who says it had to be stolen?

I do. These guys are pirates.

Abruptly, my palm is full of the rounded, voluptuous weight of the Kalashnikov butt. It gleams up at me in the low light of the corridor, and it’s begging to be squeezed.

Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No meth-head pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun.

I thrash forward another couple of steps, as an awful sense of my own failure to grasp the facts soaks into me. It’s as if I’m sucking up the viscous stuff in the corridor through tap roots in my legs and waterlogged boots, and I know that when I’m full it’s going to clog me to a violent stop.

And then I’ll swell and explode with it, like a bag of blood squeezed too hard.

You come in here again, boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.

I feel my own eyes widen with shock. I peer through the sniperscope again and this time it’s not the woman with the hardware, and it’s not the cabin aboard Impaler.

It’s the kitchen.

And it’s my mother.

She’s standing, one foot in a bowl of soapy water, and leaning over to swab her leg with a blob of cheap farm-cultured hygisponge. She’s wearing a thigh-length wrap-around weed-gatherer’s skirt that’s split down one side and she’s naked to the waist, and she’s young, younger than I can normally remember her. Her breasts hang long and smooth, like fruit, and my mouth aches with a trace memory of tasting them. She looks sideways and down at me then, and smiles.

And he slams into the room from another door that fleeting recall tells me leads out onto the wharf. Slams into the room, and slams into her like something elemental.

You cunt, you conniving fucking cunt.

With the shock of it, again, my eyes crank, and I’m suddenly standing at the threshold. The sniperscope veil is gone, this is now and real. It takes me the first three blows to move. Backhander with full swing, it’s a blow we’ve all had from him at one time or another, but this time he’s really letting go—she’s catapulted back across the kitchen into the table and falls, she gets up and he punches her down again and there’s blood, bright from her nose in a stray beam of sunlight through the blind, she struggles to get up, from the floor this time, and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me, over the threshold, over my bare feet, and then it’s as if a ghost of myself stays at the door while the rest of me runs into the room and tries to get between them.

I’m small, probably not much more than five, and he’s drunk so the blow falls inaccurately. But it’s enough to knock me back out the door. Then he comes and stands over me, hands braced clumsily on his knees, breathing heavily through a slack mouth.

You come in here again boy, and I’ll crush you ‘til you fucking pop.

He doesn’t even bother to close the door as he goes back to her.

But as I sit there in a useless heap, beginning to cry, she reaches out across the floor and shoves at the doorjamb with her hand, so it swings closed on what’s about to happen.

Then only the sound of blows, and the closed door receding.

I flounder through the canted corridor, chasing the door as the last light squeezes through the crack, and the weeping in my throat modulates upward towards a ripwing scream. A tidal rage is rising in me, and I’m growing with it,

I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door,

I’ll get there before he finally walks out on us all, disappears out of our lives and

I’ll make him disappear, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons, and the viscous slop is draining away and I hit the door like a swamp panther, but it makes no difference, it’s been closed too long, it’s solid and the impact reverberates through me like a stunblast and—

Oh, yeah. Stunblast.

So it’s not a door it’s—

—the dockside, and my face was crushed against it, sticky in a little pool of spittle and blood where I’d apparently bitten my tongue as I went down.

It’s not an uncommon outcome with stunners.

I coughed and choked on a throatful of mucus. Spat it out, took a rapid damage inventory and wished I hadn’t. My whole body was a jarring assemblage of trembling and ache from the stunblast. Nausea clawed at my bowels and the pit of my stomach, my head felt light and filled with starry air. The side of my face throbbed where the rifle butt had hit me. I lay for a moment getting it all back under some kind of control, then peeled my face away from the dock and heaved my neck up like a seal. It was a short, abortive movement. My hands were locked behind my back with some kind of webbing, and I couldn’t see much above ankle height.

Warm throb of active bioweld around my wrists. It gave so as not to maim hands held cuffed for long periods, it would dissolve like warm wax when you poured the right enzyme on it, but you could no more wriggle out of it than you could pull your own fingers off.

Pressure on my pocket brought home an expected truth. They’d taken the Tebbit knife. I was unarmed.

I retched and brought up the thin leavings of an empty stomach. Fell back and tried hard not to get my face in it. I could hear blaster fire from a long way off, and, faintly, what sounded like laughter.

A pair of boots splashed past in the wet. Stopped and came back.

“He’s coming right back round,” someone said, and whistled. “Tough little motherfucker. Hey, Vidaura, did you say you trained this guy?”

No reply. I heaved up again and succeeded in rolling onto my side.

Blinked dazedly up at the form standing over me. Vlad Tepes looked down out of a clearing sky that had almost given up on rain. The look on his face was serious and admiring, and he stood absolutely still as he watched me.

No trace of his former meth-head twitchiness to be seen.

“Good performance,” I croaked at him.

“Liked it, huh?” He grinned. “Had you fooled, right?”

I ran my tongue around my teeth and spat out some blood mingled with vomit. “Yeah, I thought Murakami had to be fucking cracked to use you. So what happened to the original Vlad?”

“Ah, well.” He made a wry face. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I know. How many more of you are there? Apart from your gorgeous-breasted psychosurgical specialist, that is.”

He laughed easily. “Yeah, she said she caught you looking. Beautiful piece of meat, isn’t it. You know, the last thing Liebeck wore before that was a Limon cable athlete’s sleeve. Flat as a board. A year down the line and she still can’t make up her mind if she’s pleased or pissed off about the change.”

“Limon, huh? Limon, Latimer.”

“That’s right.”

“Home of cutting-edge deCom.”

He grinned. “All starting to make sense, is it?”

It isn’t easy to shrug when you’re cuffed behind your back and flat to the floor. I did my best. “I saw the Tseng gear in her cabin.”

“Damn, so you weren’t looking at her tits.”

“No, I was,” I admitted. “But you know how it is. Nothing peripheral is ever lost.”

“That is the racking truth.”

“Mallory.”

We both looked towards the shout. Todor Murakami was striding along the dock from the direction of the wet bunker. He was unarmed apart from the Kalashnikov at his hip and the knife on his chest. Soft rain fell around him with a sparkle in it from the brightening sky.

“Our renegade’s sitting up and spitting,” said Mallory, gesturing at me.

“Good. Now, since you’re the only one who can get that crew of yours to do anything in a co-ordinated fashion, why don’t you go and sort them out. There are still bodies at the brothel end with stacks intact, I saw them on my way through. There may even be living witnesses hiding down there for all I know. I want a final sweep, no one left alive, and I want every stack melted to slag.” Murakami gestured disgustedly. “Jesus fuck, they’re pirates, you’d think they could manage that. Instead of which, most of them are playing at setting the panthers loose and using them for target practice. Just listen to it.”

The blasterfire was still in the air, long, undisciplined bursts laced with excited shouting and laughter. Mallory shrugged.

“So where’s Tomaselli?”

“Still setting up the gear with Liebeck. And Wang’s waiting for you on the bridge, trying to make sure no one gets eaten by accident. It’s your boat, Vlad. Go get them to stop racking about, and when they’ve finished the sweep, bring Impaler round to this side for loading.”

“Alright.” Like a ripple over water, Mallory adopted the Vlad persona and started to pick twitchily at his acne scars. He nodded down at me. “See you soon as I see you, eh, Kovacs. Soon as.”

I watched him to the corner of the station wall and round it, out of sight.

Flicked my gaze back to Murakami, who was still staring away towards the sounds of the post-op merriment.

“Fucking amateurs,” he muttered, and shook his head.

“So,” I said bleakly. “You’re deployed after all.”

“Got it in one.” As he spoke, Murakami crouched and hauled me up into an ungainly sitting position with a grunt. “Don’t hold it against me, huh? Not like I could have told you last night and appealed to your sense of nostalgia for help, is it?”

I looked around from my new vantage point and saw Virginia Vidaura, slumped against a mooring post, arms bound back. There was a long darkening bruise across her face, and her eye had swollen. She looked dully at me, and then away. There were tears smeared in the dirt and sweat on her face. No sign of Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve, dead or alive.

“So instead you played me for a sucker.”

He shrugged. “Work with the tools to hand, you know.”

“How many of you are there? Not the whole crew, apparently.”

“No,” he smiled faintly. “Just five. Mallory there, Liebeck, who I understand you’ve met, sort of. Two others, Tomaselli and Wang, and me.”

I nodded. “Covert deployment strength. I should have known there was no way you’d be just hanging around Millsport on furlough. How long have you been on the ground?”

“Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.”

“Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.”

“Not really.” Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. “They’re not overly perceptive, these meth-head guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag.” He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. “Bye bye head, bye bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after.

Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!” Murakami slapped fist into palm.

“That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and re-sleeve in a hotel bathroom.”

Sourcetown.

“You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?”

“Among others.” Another shrug. “The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.”

“Hence Tanaseda.”

“Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the haiduci, well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate no-table-manners version of the same disease. By the way, did you get your pal Segesvar? Forgot to ask before I dented you out there.”

“Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.”

Murakami chuckled. “Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?”

I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse.

“What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?”

“Ah—no, not yet.”

I opened my eyes again, surprised.

“He’s still walking around somewhere?”

Murakami made an embarrassed gesture. “Apparently. Looks like you were hard to kill, even at that age. We’ll get him, though.”

“Will you,” I said sombrely.

“Yeah, we will. With Aiura down, he’s got no handler, nowhere to run. And sure as fucking lightspeed no one else in the First Families is going to want to pick up where she left off. Not if they want the Protectorate to stay home and let them keep their oligarch toys.”

“Or,” I said casually, “you could just kill me now you’ve got me, then let him come in and cut a deal.”

Murakami frowned. “That’s not funny, Tak.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. He’s still calling himself an Envoy, you know. He’d probably jump at the chance to get back in the Corps if you offered.”

“I don’t fucking care.” There was anger in his tone now. “I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.”

“Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.”

“My life’s easy enough,” he growled. “Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.”

“You get a stack out of Aiura?”

“Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.”

“Yeah, I remember.” I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. “You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.”

He grinned unpleasantly. “Everybody cracks in the end, Tak. You know that. Virtual interrogation, it’s crack or go insane, and these days we can even bring them back from that.” The grin faded out to something harder and no less unpleasant. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Our beloved leader-in perpetuity Konrad will never know what we do or don’t get out of her. He’ll just assume the worst and cringe to heel. Or I’ll call in an assault force, torch Rila Crags around him and then feed him and his whole fucking family to the EMP.”

I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. “You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.” Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. “Is it?”

“Sorry?” But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been running for about four years, which ties in rather too neatly with the start of the Mecsek initiative. You’re not here for the Quellists, you’re here to keep an eye on the deCom technology.”

The grin crept out. “Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.”

“The orbitals?” I blinked at him. “What have the orbitals got to do with it?”

“At the moment, nothing. And that’s the way we’d like it to stay. But with deCom tech, there’s just no way to be sure of that any more.”

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the numbness. “Wha—? Why?”

“Because,” he said seriously. “The fucking stuff appears to work.”

FORTY-EIGHT

They brought Sylvie Oshima’s body out of the baling station on a bulky grey grav sled with Tseng markings and a curving plastic shield to keep the rain off. Liebeck steered the sled with a hand-held remote, and another woman I assumed was Tomaselli brought up the rear with a shoulder borne monitor system, also Tseng-logo’d. I’d managed to lever myself to my feet as they came out, and oddly Murakami seemed content to let me stay that way. We stood side by side in silence, like mourners at some premillennial funeral procession, watching the grav bed and its burden arrive. Looking down at Oshima’s face, I remembered the ornate stone garden at the top of Rila Crags, the stretcher there, and it struck me that, for the crucible of a new revolutionary era, this woman was spending a lot of time strapped unconscious to conveyances for invalids. This time, under the transparent cover, her eyes were open but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. If it hadn’t been for the vital signs display on a built in screen beside her head, you could have believed you were looking at a corpse.

You are, Tak. You’re looking at the corpse of the Quellist revolution there. This was all they had, and with Koi and the others gone, there’s no one going to bring it back to life.

It wasn’t really a shock that Murakami had executed Koi, Brasil and Tres, I’d been expecting it at some level from the moment I woke up. I’d seen it in Virginia Vidaura’s face as she slumped against the mooring post; when she spat out the words, it was no more than confirmation. And when Murakami nodded matter-of-factly and showed me the fistful of freshly excised cortical stacks, all I had was the sickening sensation of staring into a mirror at some kind of terminal damage to myself.

“Come on, Tak.” He’d stuffed the stacks back in a pocket of his stealth suit and wiped his hands together dismissively, grimacing. “I had no choice, you can see that. I already told you we can’t afford a rerun of the Unsettlement. Not least because these guys were always going to lose, and then the Protectorate boot comes down, and who wants that?”

Virginia Vidaura spat at him. It was a good effort, considering she was still slumped against the mooring post three or four metres away.

Murakami sighed.

“Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.”

“Yeah,” she snapped. “And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.”

Murakami shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.”

“And why is it gone?” Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. “You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.”

Murakami made an exasperated gesture. “Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.”

“That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.” But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. “Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.”

Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

“Yeah, thing is, Virginia,” he said when she’d finished, “they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me—you trained me, in fact—to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.

“Fucking Mecsek,” Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. “If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.”

“Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?”

He nodded glumly. “Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.”

“Thought that was what you wanted,” Virginia Vidaura said faintly. “Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?”

He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.

“What’s this about making history, Tod?” I asked tonelessly. “What’s going on with deCom?”

He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before.

He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.

“What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.”

Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.

“Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,” I said mildly.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. “What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.” He choked a laugh. “And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.”

I felt suddenly like sitting down again. The trembling from the stunblast came rolling back over me, up from the guts and through my head, leaving it light. I swallowed the nausea and tried to think straight over a clamour of suddenly recalled detail. Sylvie’s Slipins in laconic, murderous action against the scorpion gun cluster.

Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.

Yeah. And besides which, we want the flicking land.

Orr and his wrecking bar, stood over the dysfunctional karakuri in the tunnel under Drava. So we going to switch it off or what?

DeCom bravado aboard Guns for Guevara, vaguely amusing for its ludicrous presumption, until you gave it a context that might mean something.

Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.

Yeah, count me in. Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.

Oh fuck.

“You really think she could do that,” I asked numbly. “You think she’s capable of talking to the orbitals?”

He bared his teeth. It was anything but a grin. “Tak, for all I know she already has been talking to them. We’ve got her sedated right now, and the Tseng gear is monitoring her for transmissions, that’s part of the brief, but there’s no telling what she’s already done.”

“And if she starts?”

He shrugged and looked away. “Then I’ve got my orders.”

“Oh, great. Very constructive.”

“Tak, what fucking choice do we have?” Desperation edged his voice. “You know the weird shit that’s been going down in New Hok. Mimints doing things they’re not supposed to, mimints built to specs no one remembers from the Unsettlement. Everyone thinks that’s some kind of machine evolution, basic nanotech all grown up, but what if it’s not? What if it’s deCom that’s triggering this? What if the orbitals are waking up because they’ve got a whiff of the command software, and they’re doing something to the mimints in response? That stuff was designed to appeal to Martian machine systems, as near as we understand them, and the word out of Latimer is that it works. So why wouldn’t it work here?”

I stared at Sylvie Oshima and Jad’s voice echoed back through my head.

—all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post Lyamon—

—handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other—

My mind went spinning off down the avenues Murakami’s own Envoy intuition had opened for me. What if they hadn’t been fighting each other?

Or what if—

Sylvie, semi-conscious on a bunk in Drava, muttering. It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—

The woman who called herself Nadia Makita, lying in another bunk aboard Boubin Islander.

Grigori. There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.

“Those people you’ve got in your pocket,” I said quietly to Murakami. “The ones you murdered for the sake of a more stable tomorrow for us all. They all believed this was Quellcrist Falconer.”

“Well, belief is a funny thing, Tak.” He was staring away past the grav sled and there was no humour in his tone at all. “You’re an Envoy, you know that.”

“Yeah. So what do you believe?”

For a couple of moments he was silent. Then he shook his head and looked at me directly.

“What do I believe, Tak? I believe that if we’re about to decode the keys to Martian civilisation, then the Really Dead coming back to life is going to seem like a small and relatively unremarkable event.”

“You think it’s her?”

“I don’t care if it’s her. It doesn’t change a thing.”

A shout from Tomaselli. Impaler came forging round the side of Segesvar’s devastated farm like some huge thuggish cyborg elephant ray. At the risk of throwing up again, I worked the neurachem gingerly and made out Mallory standing in the conning tower with his coms officer and a couple of other pirates I didn’t recognise. I stood closer to Murakami.

“I’ve got one other question, Tod. What are you planning to do with us? Virginia and me?”

“Well.” He rubbed vigorously at his cropped hair so fine spray flew out of it. The hint of a grin surfaced, as if the return to practical topics of conversation was some kind of reunion with an old friend. “That’s a little problematic, but we’ll sort something out. Way things are these days back on Earth, they’d probably want me to bring you both in, or wipe you both out. Renegade Envoys don’t profile well under the current administration.”

I nodded wearily. “And so?”

The grin powered up. “And so fuck ‘em. You’re an Envoy, Tak. So is she. Just because you lost your clubhouse privileges, doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Just walking away from the Corps doesn’t change what you are. You think I’m going to write that off because a greasy little gang of Earth politicians are looking for scapegoats.”

I shook my head. “That’s your employers you’re talking about there, Tod.”

“Fuck that. I answer to Envoy Command. We don’t EMP our own people.” He caught his lower lip in his teeth, glanced at Virginia Vidaura and then back at me. His voice dropped to a mutter. “But I’m going to need some co-operation to swing this, Tak. She’s taking the whole thing too hard. I can’t turn her loose with that attitude. Not least because she’s likely to put a plasmafrag bolt through the back of my head as soon as I turn around.”

Impaler drifted in sideways towards an unused section of the dock.

Her grapples fired and chewed holes in the evercrete. A couple of them hit rotten patches and tugged loose as soon as they started to crank taut.

The hoverloader backed off slightly in a mound of stirred-up water and shredded belaweed. The grapples wound back and fired again.

Something behind me wailed.

At first, some stupid part of me thought it was Virginia Vidaura finally venting her pent-up grief. A fraction of a second later I caught up with the machine tone of the sound and identified it for what it was—an alarm.

Time seemed to slam to a halt. Seconds turned into ponderous slabs of perception, everything moved with the lazy calm of motion underwater.

—Liebeck, spinning away from the water’s edge, lit spliff tumbling from her open mouth, bouncing off the upper slope of her breast in a brief splutter of embers—

—Murakami, yelling at my ear, moving past me towards the grav sled—

—The monitor system built into the sled screaming, a whole rack of datacoil systems flaring to life like candles along one side of Sylvie Oshima’s suddenly twitching body—

—Sylvie’s eyes, wide open and fixed on mine as the gravity of her stare drags my own gaze in—

—The alarm, unfamiliar as the new Tseng hardware, but only one possible meaning behind it—

—And Murakami’s arm, raised, hand filled with the Kalashnikov as he clears it from his belt—

—My own yell, stretching out and blending with his as I throw myself forward to block him, hands still bound, hopelessly slow—

And then the clouds ripped open in the east, and vomited angelfire.

And the dock lit up with light and fury.

And the sky fell in.

FORTY-NINE

Afterwards, it took me a while to realise I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colours seemed bleached out of the surroundings.

The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic, it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few metres out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames.

Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look round.

It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelt scorched.

I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.

“Grigori fucking Ishii,” she said, still without looking at me.

“Sylvie?”

Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.

“This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths she came in on too once I started looking.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. “I opened the way.”

“You’re losing me. Who is Grigori Ishii?”

“You really don’t remember? Kid’s history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?”

“My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.”

“Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fall-back detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.”

“Then…”

“Yeah.” She laughed, barely, a single small sound. “She is who she says she is.”

“Did?” I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. “Did she do this?”

“No, I did.” A shrugged correction. “They did, I asked them to.”

“You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?”

A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. “Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

I pressed a hand hard against my face. “Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?”

“Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.” She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. “It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.”

I coughed, laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?”

“She was lost at first,” she murmured. “She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking strong.”

I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.

“So how did she get out?”

Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. “The orbital sent her.”

“Oh, please.”

“No, it’s.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behaviour in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burnt out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii—he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.”

“Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.”

“Not me. She knew it, she recognised something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.” She shivered. “There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells, it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.

“But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?”

“I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years, that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.”

I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angel fire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outwith their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.

Pilot error?

“Sylvie?”

“What?” She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.

“Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?”

“Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?”

“There was a firelight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think …?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.” She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. “I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.”

Todor Murakami, vaporised. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armoured body of the lmpaler and the hundreds of cubic metres of water she floated on, even—I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each—the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands.

All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.

I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.

“What does it feel like?” I asked her gently. “Talking to them?”

She snorted. “What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.” She gestured. “Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the … Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.” She grinned sourly. “Union with the Godhead. Except people like my mother would have run screaming out of the upload centre rather than really face something like that. It’s a dark path, Micky, I opened the door and the software knew what to do next, it wanted to take me there, it’s what it’s for. But it’s dark and it’s cold, it leaves you. Naked. Stripped down. There are things like wings to cover you, but they’re cold, Micky. Cold and rough and they smell of cherries and mustard.”

“But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, running it?”

Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?”

For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousand and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.

I shook my head. Borrowed imagery from the Renouncer school, and some trace element of perverse Christian sacrifice myth. It’s the first thing they teach cub archaeologues. Don’t try to transfer your anthropomorphic baggage onto what is nothing like human.

“Too easy,” I said.

“Yeah. What I thought. Anyway, it’s the orbital that’s talking, it feels like a machine the same way the mimints do, the same way the software does. But yes, there are still Martians in there. Grigori Ishii, what’s left of him, gibbers about them when you can get any verbal sense out of him at all.

And I think Nadia’s going to remember something similar when she gets enough distance on it. I think when she does that, when she finally remembers how she walked out of their database and into my head, she’s going to be able to really talk to them. And it’s going to make the link I’ve got look like Morse code on tom-toms by comparison.”

“I thought she didn’t know how to use the command software.”

“She doesn’t. Not yet. But I can teach her, Micky.”

There was a peculiar tranquillity on Sylvie Oshima’s face as she spoke. It was something I’d never seen there before, in all the time we spent together in the Uncleared and after. It reminded me of Nikolai Natsume’s face in the Renouncer monastery, before we came and spoilt it all for him sense of purpose, confirmed beyond human doubt. A belonging to what you did that I hadn’t known since Innenin, and that I didn’t expect to feel again. I felt a wry envy curl through me instead.

“Going to be a deCom sensei, Sylvie? That the plan?”

She gestured impatiently. “I’m not talking about teaching in the real world, I’m talking about her. Down in the capacity vault, I can crank up the real-time ratio so we get months out of every minute, and I can show her how to do this. It’s not like hunting the mimints, that’s not what this stuff is for. It’s only now I realise that. All the time I spent in the Uncleared, it feels like I was half-asleep by comparison with this. This, it feels like I was born for.”

“That’s the software talking, Sylvie.”

“Yeah, maybe. So what?”

I couldn’t think of any answer to that. Instead, I looked across at the grav sled where Virginia Vidaura lay in place of Sylvie. I moved closer, and it felt like something was tugging me there by a cable wired into my guts.

“She going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sylvie pushed herself wearily off the mooring post.

“Friend of yours, huh?”

“Er—something like that.”

“Yeah, well, that bruising on her face looks bad. Think the bone might be cracked. I stuck her in there as gently as I could, kicked the system on, but all it’s done so far is sedate her, on general principles I think. Haven’t got a diagnosis out of it yet. It’ll need re—”

“Hmm?”

I turned to prompt her and saw the grey-cased canister at the top of its arc. There was no time to get to Sylvie, no time to do anything except fling myself, tumbling over the grav sled and into the scant shadow its covered length offered. Tseng military custom—at a minimum it had to be battlefield-hardened.

I hit the ground on the other side and flattened myself to the dock, arms wrapped over my head.

The grenade blew with a curiously muffled crump, and something in my head screamed with the sound. A muted Shockwave slapped me, dented my hearing. I was on my feet in the blurred humming it left, no time to check for shrapnel injuries, snarling, spinning to face him as he climbed out of the water at the edge of the dock. I had no weapons, but I came round the end of the grav sled as if my hands were filled with them.

“That was fast,” he called. “Thought I’d get you both there.”

His clothes were drenched from his swim, and there was a long gash across his forehead that the water had leached pink and bloodless, but the poise in the amber-skinned sleeve hadn’t gone anywhere. The black hair was still long, tangled messily to his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be armed, but he grinned at me just the same.

Sylvie lay crumpled, halfway between the water and the sled. I couldn’t see her face.

“I’m going to fucking kill you now,” I said coldly.

“Yeah, you’re going to try, old man.”

“Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any fucking idea who you just killed?”

He shook his head, mock-sorrowful. “You really are getting past your sell-by date, aren’t you? You think I’m going to go back to the Harlan family with a corpse when I can take a live sleeve. That’s not what I’m getting paid for. That was a stun grenade, my last one unfortunately. Didn’t you hear it crack? Kind of hard to mistake if you’ve been anywhere near a battlefield recently. Ah, but then maybe you haven’t. Shockwave knock-out and inhaled molecular shrapnel to keep everyone that way. She’ll be out all day.”

“Don’t lecture me on battlefield weaponry, Kovacs. I fucking was you, and I gave it up to do something more interesting.”

“Really?” The anger sparked in the startling blue eyes. “What was that, then? Low grade criminality or failed revolutionary politics? They tell me you’ve had a crack at both.”

I stalked forward a step, and watched him draw into a combat guard.

“Whatever they tell you, I have seen a century more sunrises than you. And now I’m going to take them all away from you.”

“Yeah?” He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Well if they’re all leading up to what you are now, you’d be doing me a favour. Because whatever else happens to me, the one thing I never want to be is you. I’d rather blow my own stack out the back of my head than end up standing where you are now.”

“Then why don’t you do that. It’ll save me the trouble.”

He laughed. It was meant to be contemptuous, I think, but didn’t quite make it. There was a nervousness to it, and too much emotion. He made a displacement gesture.

“Man, I’m almost tempted to let you walk away, I feel so sorry for you.”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not going to let you take her back to Harlan again. This is over.”

“It certainly fucking is. I can’t believe how totally you’ve fucked up your life. Just fucking look at you.”

“You look at me. It’s the last face you’re ever going to see, you stupid little fuck.”

“Don’t get melodramatic on me, old man.”

“Oh, you think this is melodrama?”

“No.” This time he got the edge on the contempt about right. “It’s too fucking pitiful even for that. It’s wildlife. You’re like some lame old wolf that can’t keep up with the pack any more, has to hang around on the fringes and hope it can grab some meat no one else wants. I can’t believe you fucking quit the Corps, man. I can’t fucking believe it.”

“Yeah, well you weren’t fucking there,” I snapped.

“Yeah, because if I had been, it never would have happened. You think I would have let it all go down the drain like that? Just fucking walked away, like Dad did?”

“Hey, fuck you!”

“You left them just the same, you fuck. You walked out on the Corps and you walked out of their lives.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. They needed me in their lives like a fucking webjelly in a swimming pool. I was a criminal.”

“That’s right, you were. What do you want, a fucking medal for it?”

“Oh what would you have done? You’re an ex-Envoy. You know what that means? Barred from holding public office, military rank or any corporate post above menial level. No access to legal credit facilities. You’re so fucking smart, what would you have done with that hand?”

“I wouldn’t have quit in the first place.” “You weren’t fucking there.”

“Oh, okay. What would I have done as an ex-Envoy? I don’t know. But what I do fucking know is that I wouldn’t have ended up like you after nearly two hundred years. Alone, broke and dependent on Radul Segesvar and a bunch of fucking surfers. You know I tracked you to Rad before you got here yourself. Did you know that?”

“Of course I did.”

He stumbled for a moment. Not much Envoy poise in his voice, he was too angry.

“Yeah, and did you know we’ve plotted just about every move you’ve made since Tekitomura? Did you know I set up the ambush at Rila?”

“Yes, that bit seemed to go especially well.”

A new increment of rage twisted his face. “It didn’t fucking matter, because we had Rad anyway. We were covered from the start. Why do you think you got away so fucking easily?”

“Uh, because the orbitals shot down your swoopcopter, and the rest of you were too fucking incompetent to track us into the Northern arm perhaps?”

“Fuck you. You think we looked hard for you? We knew where you were going, man, right from the start. We’ve been on you right from the fucking start.”

Enough. It was a hard pellet of decision in the centre of my chest, and it drove me forward, hands raised.

“Well then,” I said softly. “All you’ve got to do now is finish it. Think you can manage that all on your own?”

There was a long moment when we stared at each other, and the inevitability of the fight dripped down behind our eyes. Then he rushed me.

Shattering blows to throat and groin, unwrapping from a tightly gathered line of attack that drove me back a full two metres before I could contain it. I turned the groin strike on a sweeping block downward with one arm and dropped low enough to take the throat chop on the forehead.

My own counter exploded at the same time, directly up and into the base of his chest. He staggered, tried to hook my arm with a favourite aikido move I recognised so well that I nearly laughed. I broke free of it and stabbed at his eyes with stiffened fingers. He swept a tight, graceful circle out of reach and unleashed a side kick into my ribs. It was too high, and it wasn’t fast enough. I grabbed the foot and twisted savagely. He rolled with it, took the fall and kicked for my head with his other foot as momentum rolled him through the air. His instep cracked me across the face—I was already backing off, rapidly to avoid the full force of the kick. I lost my hold on his foot and my vision flew briefly apart. I staggered back against the grav sled as he hit the ground. It bobbed on its fields and held me up. I shook my head to get the airy lightness out of it.

It wasn’t quite as savage as it should have been. We were both tired and relying inevitably on the conditioned systems in the sleeves we wore. We were both making mistakes that under other circumstances might have been lethal. And, perhaps, we were neither of us really sure what we were doing here in the quiet, mist-tinged unreality of the empty dock.

The aspirants believe …

Sylvie’s voice, brooding in the capacity vault.

Everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it.

That’s comforting, isn’t it.

I spat and drew breath. Got off the curve of the grav sled cover.

If you let it be.

Across the dock, he climbed back to his feet. I got in fast, while he was still recovering, summoned everything I had left. He saw it coming and twisted to meet me. Kick turned off a raised and crooked leg, fists brushed aside on a pivoting double handed block across his head and chest. I lunged past on deflected momentum and he followed me round, elbow hooking into the back of my head. I went down before he could do more damage, rolled and flailed in an attempt to knock his feet out from under him. He danced aside, took the time to snarl a grin, and came back in, stamping.

For the second time that morning, my time sense dissolved. Combat conditioning and the jacked-up Eishundo nervous system slowed everything to a crawl, blurry motion scrawled around the approaching strike and behind it the bared teeth of his grin.

Stop laughing, you fuck.

Segesvar’s face, long decades of bitterness contorting to rage and then despair as my taunts sheared through the armour of illusions he’d built up for himself over a lifetime of violence.

Murakami, fistful of bloody excised stacks, shrugging back at me like a mirror.

Mother, and the dream and—

—and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me—

—tidal rage, rising—

—I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door—

—I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons—

—a shadow play—

His foot came down. It seemed to take forever. I rolled at the last moment, into him. Committed, he had nowhere to go. The blow landed on my upturned shoulder and unbalanced him. I kept rolling and he stumbled. Luck put one of his heels against something lying on the dock.

Sylvie’s motionless form. He toppled backwards over her.

I came upright, hurdled Sylvie’s body and this time I caught him before he could regain his feet. I put a brutal kick into the side of his head. Blood jumped in the air as his scalp tore. Another, before he could roll. His mouth tore, and spilt more blood. He slumped, propped himself groggily up and I landed hard on his right arm and chest with all my weight. He grunted and I thought I felt the arm snap. I lashed down with open palm to his temple. His head rolled, his eyes fluttered. I drew up for the chop to the throat that would crush his larynx.

—a shadow play—

Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand.

It’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.

I stared down at him. He was barely moving, he’d be easy to kill.

I stared at him.

Self hatred—

Shadow play—

Mother—

Out of nowhere, an image of hanging beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura from a grip welded shut. Paralysed and suspended. I saw my hand clamped on the cable, holding me up. Keeping me alive.

Locking me in place.

I saw myself unhinge the grip, one numbed finger at a time, and move.

I got up.

I got off him and stepped back. Stood staring, trying to work out what

I’d just done. He blinked up at me.

“You know,” I said, and my voice jammed rustily. I had to start again, quietly, wearily. “You know, fuck you. You weren’t at Innenin, you weren’t on Loyko, you weren’t at Sanction IV or Hun Home. You’ve never even been to Earth. What the fuck do you know?”

He spat out blood. Sat up and wiped his smashed mouth. I laughed mirthlessly and shook my head.

“You know what, let’s see you do it better. Think you can sidestep all my fuck-ups? Go on then. Fucking try.” I moved aside and waved at the moored ranks of skimmers by the dock. “Got to be a few of those that weren’t shot up all that badly. Choose your own ride out of here. No one’s going to be looking for you, get moving while you’re ahead.”

He picked himself up a fraction at a time. His eyes never left mine, his hands trembled with tension, floating at guard. Maybe I hadn’t broke his arm after all. I laughed again, and it felt better this time.

“I mean it. Let’s see you steer my fucking life better than I have. Let’s see you not end up like I have. Go on.”

He stepped past me, still wary, face grim.

“I will,” he said. “I don’t see how I could do much worse.”

“Then fucking go. Get the fuck out of here.” I grabbed at the fresh anger, the urge to knock him down again and finish it. I cranked it back down. It took surprisingly little effort. My voice came out even again. “Don’t fucking stand here bitching to me about it, let’s see you do better.”

He gave me one more guarded look, and then he walked away, to the edge of the dock and towards the less damaged skimmers.

I watched him go.

A dozen metres away, he paused and turned back. I thought he started to lift one hand.

And a liquid gout of blasterfire splashed out from across the dock. It caught him in the head and chest and torched away everything in its path.

He stood for a moment, gone from the chest up, and then the smoking ruins of his body collapsed sideways, over the edge of the dock, bounced off the nose carapace of the nearest skimmer and slid into the water with a flat splash.

Something tiny stabbed up under my ribs. A small noise came seeping up through me and I locked it down behind my teeth. I spun, weaponless in the direction the blast had come from.

Jadwiga stepped out of a doorway in the baling station. From somewhere she’d got hold of Murakami’s plasmafrag rifle, or one very like it.

She held it propped upright on her hip. The heat haze still shimmered around the muzzle.

“I take it you’ve not got a problem with that,” she called across the breeze and the dead quiet between us.

I closed my eyes and stood there, just breathing.

It didn’t help.