“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.
“Oh, a while. While longer than I’d like, but—”
A shrug. I nodded.
“But it pays. Right?”
He grinned sourly. “Right. I’ve got a younger brother studying Martian artifact tech in Millsport, parents both coming up on needing resleeves they can’t afford. Way the economy’s going right now, nothing else I could do would pay enough to cover the outlay. And the way Mecsek’s butchered the education charter and the sleeve pension system, these days you don’t pay, you don’t get.”
“Yeah, they’ve really fucked things up since I was last here.”
“Been away, huh?” He didn’t push the point the way Plex had. Old-style Harlan’s World courtesy—if I wanted to tell him I’d been doing time in storage, he probably figured I’d get around to it. And if I didn’t, well, then, what business was it of his anyway.
“Yeah, about thirty, forty years. Lot of changes.”
Another shrug. “Been coming for longer than that. Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened. Mecsek’s just the late-stage bad news.”
“This enemy you cannot kill,”
I murmured.
He nodded and finished the quote for me.
“You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.”
“So I guess someone’s not been watching the waves very carefully.”
“That isn’t it, Micky.” He was looking away toward the failing light in the west, arms folded. “Times have changed since she was around, that’s all. What’s the point of toppling a First Families regime, here or anywhere else, if the Protectorate are just going to come in and unload the Envoys on you for your trouble?”
“You got a point there.”
He grinned again, more real humor in it this time. “Sam, it’s not
a
point. It’s
the
point. It’s the single big difference between then and now. If the Envoy Corps had existed back in the Unsettlement, Quellism would have lasted about six months. You can’t fight those fuckers.”
“They lost at Innenin.”
“Yeah, and how often have they lost since? Innenin was a minor glitch, a blip on the scope, strictly.”
Memory roared briefly down on me.
Jimmy de Soto screaming and clawing at the ruins of his face with fingers that have already scooped out one eye and look like getting the other if I don’t . . .
I locked it down.
Minor glitch. Blip on the scope.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“Maybe I am,” he agreed quietly.
We stood for a while in silence after that, watching the dark arrive. The sky had cleared enough to show a waning Daikoku spiked on mountains to the north and a full but distant Marikanon like a copper coin thrown high over our heads. Swollen Hotei still lay below the horizon to the west. Behind us, the fire settled in. Our shadows shaded into solidity amid flickering red glow.
When it started to get too hot to stand there comfortably, Oishii offered a mannered excuse and drifted away. I endured the heat across my back for another minute after he’d gone, then turned and stared blink-eyed into the flames. A couple of Oishii’s crew crouched on the far side of the fire, warming their hands. Rippling, indistinct figures in the heated air and darkness. Low tones of conversation. Neither of them looked at me. Hard to tell if that was old-style courtesy like Oishii’s or just the usual deCom cliquishness.
What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?
Always the easy questions.
I left the fire and picked my way through the bubblefabs to where we’d pitched three of our own, diplomatically separate from Oishii’s. Smooth cold on my face and hands as my skin noticed the sudden lack of warmth. Moonglow on the ’fabs made them look like breaching bottlebacks in a sea of grass. When I reached the one where Sylvie was bedded down, I noticed brighter light splintering out around the closed flap. The others were in darkness. Alongside, two bugs leaned at canted angles on their parking racks, steering gear and weapons stands branching against the sky. The third was gone.
I touched the chime patch, pulled open the flap, and went in. On one side of the interior, Jadwiga and Kiyoka sprang hastily apart on a tangle of bedding. Opposite them, beside a muffled illuminum night-lamp, Sylvie lay corpse-like in her sleeping bag, hair combed carefully back from her face. A portable heater glowed at her feet. There was no one else in the ’fab.
“Where’s Orr?”
“Not here.” Jad rearranged her clothing crossly. “You might have fucking knocked, Micky.”
“I did.”
“Okay, you might have fucking knocked
and waited,
then.”
“Sorry, it’s not what I was expecting. So where’s Orr?”
Kiyoka waved an arm. “Gone on the bug with Lazlo. They volunteered for perimeter watch. Got to show willing, we figured. These people are going to carry us home tomorrow.”
“So why don’t you guys use one of the other ’fabs?”
Jadwiga looked across to Sylvie. “Because someone’s got to keep watch in here, too,” she said softly.
“I’ll do it.”
They both looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then at each other. Then Kiyoka shook her head.
“Can’t. Orr’d fucking kill us.”
“Orr isn’t here.”
Another exchange of glances. Jad shrugged.
“Yeah, fuck it, why not.” She stood up. “C’mon, Ki. Watch won’t change for another four hours. Orr’s not going to be any the wiser.”
Kiyoka hesitated. She leaned over Sylvie and put a hand on her forehead.
“All right, but if anything—”
“Yeah, I’ll call you. Go on, get out of here.”
“Yeah, Ki—come
on.
” Jadwiga chivied the other woman to the doorflap. As they were stepping out, she paused and grinned back at me. “And Micky. I’ve seen the way you look at her. No peeking and prodding, eh? No squeezing the fruit. Keep your fingers out of pies that don’t belong to you.”
I grinned back. “Fuck you, Jad.”
“Yeah, you wish. In your dreams, man.”
Kiyoka mouthed a more conventional
thanks,
and they were gone. I sat down beside Sylvie and stared at her in silence. After a couple of moments, I reached out and stroked her brow in an echo of Kiyoka’s gesture. She didn’t move. Her skin was hot and papery dry.
“Come on, Sylvie. Pull out of there.”
No response.
I took back my hand and stared at the woman some more.
What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?
She’s not Sarah. Sarah’s gone. What the fuck are you—
Oh, shut up.
It’s not like I had another choice, is it?
Recall of the final moments in Tokyo Crow came and demolished that one. The safety of the table with Plex, the warm anonymity, and the promise of a ticket out tomorrow—I remembered standing up and walking away from it all, as if in answer to a siren song. Into the blood and fury of the fight.
In retrospect it was a moment so hinged, so loaded with implications of shifting fate, that it should have creaked at me as I moved to step through it.
But in retrospect they always are.
Got to say, Micky, I like you.
Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows.
Can’t put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.
That’s nice.
But it’s not enough.
My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve; it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone-new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket, and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.
Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. Half a dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament microjacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others—precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.
The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state-installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel. I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.
I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.
Is this enough?
Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.
I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.
Is this—
A hand closed on my arm.
The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.
“You,” she said in Japanese, and coughed. “Help me.
Help me.
”
It was not her voice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the ever-present bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison, and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro-government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In among the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” muttered one of Oishii’s crew.
Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.
We passed newly installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.
Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless; you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.
It wasn’t over. Not nearly.
Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the ever-present tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realized for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been—none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.
The beachhead defenses flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways; livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head, and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.
Overexposure,
Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner.
You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilized. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full checkup.
She seethed.
A couple of
months
? Fucking
Millsport
?
A detached deCom shrug.
Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.
The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.
Burn some of that stored credit,
grinned Jadwiga.
Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.
The beachhead gate juddered up for us, and we passed through into the compound. In comparison with the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ’fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.
“Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,” Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. “See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?”
Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.
“I’ll go, skipper,” offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing. Frosted snow crunched under his feet. “Rest of you go get some coffee or something.”
“Cool,” said Jadwiga. “And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” Lazlo rolled his eyes. “Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?”
I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?”
Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head toward the center of the camp.
“Come on then. Let’s get this over with.”
• • •
Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly heated outer chamber of the command ’fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets. Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls, and a corner-mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots. Our breath clouded faintly in the air.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.
“What?”
“Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?”
A grin surfaced on his face. “Well, you know I always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.”
“Las.”
“Okay, okay.” He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. “You were there with her when she woke up, right.”
“Right.”
“What did she say to you? Really.”
I shifted around to look at him. “Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.”
“Yeah.” He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. “See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.”
“Really?” I kept my tone mild.
“Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.” He turned to meet my eyes. “You’ve lost your appetite.”
“She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.”
He shook his head. “Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.”
“I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.”
And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline.
So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.
We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.
“Not going to tell me, huh?”
“There’s nothing to tell, Las.”
More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.
“Look, Micky.” Lazlo hesitated. “I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me, you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.”
“Thanks,” I said drily. “And to what do I owe this honor?”
“Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—”
The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.
“All yours. See you in the bar.”
We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.
Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ’fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of colored light across the spotless work surface.
“Oshima’s ill?” he asked flatly.
“Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands.” Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. “Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?”
“The highlands.” Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. “Nearly seven hundred kilometers north of where you agreed to operate. Where you
contracted
to work cleanup.”
Lazlo shrugged. “Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have to—”
“You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed
giri
to the beachhead, and to me.”
“We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.” The lie came out, Envoy-smooth. Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight—it had been a while since I’d done this. “Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.”
Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me, Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance, and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.
“You are Serendipity?”
“Yes.”
“The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?”
Tag the pressure point, go after it. “I, too, owe
giri
in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.”
“Yes. So I see.” Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. “Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.”
This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around campfires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. “Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.”
“And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.”
“Jesus, Shig, we were fucking
blinded.
”
The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.”
“But—”
“We fell back to the northeast,” I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. “As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.”
“We? You were involved in that decision?”
“I was bleeding to death,” I repeated.
Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. “You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.”
“Yeah, that’s ’cause we brought the fucking house down on them,” snapped Lazlo. “Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand-to-fucking-hand in a tunnel on our way out.”
Again, Kurumaya favored the wincefish with a cold stare.
“There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower-level structure. If there—”
“
If
? Fucking
if
?”
“—were mimints as you claim, they would have been vaporized. The two in the tunnel have been found, and seem to corroborate the story you transmitted to us once you were safely removed to the Uncleared. In the meantime, you may also be interested to know that the sweepers you left behind
did
encounter karakuri nests several hours later and two kilometers farther west. In the ensuing suppression, there were twenty-seven deaths. Nine of them real, stack unrecovered.”
“That is a tragedy,” I said evenly. “But we would not have been able to prevent it. Had we returned with our injured and our damaged command systems, we would only have been a burden. Under the circumstances, we looked for ways to return to full operational strength as rapidly as possible instead.”
“Yes. Your report says that.”
He brooded for a few moments. I flickered another look at Lazlo, in case he was about to open his mouth again. Kurumaya’s eyes lifted to meet mine.
“Very well. You are billeted along with Eminescu’s crew for the time being. I will have a software medic examine Oshima, for which you will be billed. Allowing that her condition is stable, there will be a full investigation into the temple incident as soon as the weather clears.”
“What?” Lazlo took a step forward. “You expect us to fucking hang around here while you dig up that mess? No fucking way, man. We’re gone. Back to Tek’to on that fucking ’loader out there.”
“Las—”
“I do not
expect
you to stay in Drava, no. I am ordering it. There is a command structure here, whether you like it or not. If you attempt to board the
Daikoku Dawn,
you will be stopped.” Kurumaya frowned. “I would prefer not to be so direct, but if you force me to, I will have you confined.”