“No.” She shook her head, chewing. “There’s something wrong. I can feel it. I can feel them out there, but I can’t pin down enough for a transmission link.”
Her eyes lowered, creased in a frown that looked like pain.
“There’s something wrong,” she repeated quietly.
“You didn’t take the scarf off, did you?”
She looked at me. “No. I didn’t take the scarf off. That doesn’t affect functionality, Micky. It just pisses me off.”
I shrugged. “You and me both.”
Her eyes tracked to the pocket where I habitually kept the excised cortical stacks, but she said nothing.
We stayed out of each other’s way for the rest of the day. Sylvie sat at the datacoil most of the time, periodically inducing shifts in the colored display without touching it or speaking. At one point, she went into her bedroom and lay there for an hour, staring at the ceiling. Glancing in on my way past to the bathroom, I saw her lips moving silently. I took a shower, stood by the window, ate fruit, and drank coffee I didn’t want. Eventually I went outside and wandered around the margins of the eyrie’s base, talking desultorily to Dig 301 who, for some reason, had taken it upon herself to tag along. Maybe she was there to make sure I didn’t deface anything.
An undefined tension sat in the cold mountain air. Like sex unperformed, like bad weather coming in.
We can’t stay like this forever,
I knew.
Something has to give.
But instead it got dark, and after another monosyllabic meal we went to our separate beds early. I lay in the deadened quiet of the cabin’s soundproofing, imagining night sounds that mostly belonged to a climate much farther south. It hit me suddenly that I should have been there nearly two months back. Envoy conditioning—focus on your immediate surroundings and cope—had kept me from thinking about it much over the past several weeks, but whenever I had time my mind slipped back to Newpest and the Weed Expanse. It wasn’t like anyone would be missing me exactly, but appointments had been made and now broken, and Radul Segesvar would be wondering if my silent disappearance might in fact signify detection and capture, with all the associated grief that could bring home to him on the Expanse. Segesvar owed me, but it was a debt of arguable worth and with the southern mafias, it doesn’t do to push that angle too hard. The
haiduci
don’t have the ethical discipline of the yakuza. And at a couple of months silently overdue, I was pushing it to the limit.
My hands were itching again. Gene-twitch of the desire to grab a rock surface and scale it the fuck out of here.
Face it, Micky. It’s time to cut loose from this. Your deCom days are over. Fun while it lasted, and it got you a new face and these gecko hands, but enough’s enough. It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.
I turned on my side and stared at the wall. On the other side, Sylvie would be lying in the same quiet, the same isolation. Maybe the same harbor chop of distressed sleep as well.
What am I supposed to do? Leave her?
You’ve done worse.
I saw Orr’s accusatory stare.
You don’t fucking touch her.
Heard Lazlo’s voice.
I’m trusting you, Micky.
Yeah,
my own voice jeered through me.
He’s trusting Micky. Takeshi Kovacs, he hasn’t met yet.
And if she is who she says she is?
Oh, come on. Quellcrist Falconer? You heard the machine. Quellcrist Falconer got turned into airborne ash at seven hundred meters above Alabardos.
Then who is she? The ghost, the one in the stack. Maybe she’s not Nadia Makita, but she sure as hell thinks she is. And she sure as fuck isn’t Sylvie Oshima. So who is she?
No idea. Is that supposed to be your problem?
I don’t know, is it?
Your problem is that the yakuza have hired your own sweet self out of some archive stack to take you down. Very fucking poetic and you know what, he’ll probably do not a bad job for them. He’ll certainly have the resources—a global writ, remember. And you can bet the incentive scheme has a real fucking edge on it. You know the rules on double-sleeving.
And at the moment the only thing linking all this to that sleeve you’re wearing is the woman next door and her low-grade mercenary pals. So the sooner you cut loose from them, head south, and get on with the job at hand, the better for all concerned.
The job at hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.
And stop fucking calling me that.
Impatiently, I threw off the cover and got out of bed. I cracked the door and saw an empty room beyond. The table and the weaving datacoil, bright in the darkness, the bulk of our two packs leaning together in a corner. Hotei light painted the shapes of the windows in pale orange on the floor. I trod naked through the moonsplash and crouched by the packs, rooting around for a can of amphetamine cola.
Fuck sleep.
I heard her behind me and turned with a cold, unfamiliar unease feathering my bones. Not knowing whom I’d be face-to-face with.
“You, too, huh?”
It was Sylvie Oshima’s voice, Sylvie Oshima’s slightly quizzical lupine look as she stood facing me with arms wrapped around herself. She was naked as well, breasts gathered up and pressed in the V of her arms like a gift she planned to give me. Hips tilted in midstep, one curved thigh slightly behind the other. Hair in tangled disarray around her sleep-smudged face. In the light from Hotei, her pale skin took on tones of warm copper and fireglow. She smiled uncertainly.
“I keep waking up. Feels like my head’s running on overdrive.” She nodded at the cola can in my hand. “That isn’t going to help, you know.”
“I don’t feel like sleeping.” My voice came out a little hoarse.
“No.” The smile inked out to sudden seriousness. “I don’t feel like sleeping, either. I feel like doing what you wanted before.”
She unfolded her arms, and her breasts hung free. A little selfconsciously, she raised her arms and pushed back the mass of her hair, pressing her hands to the back of her head. She shifted her legs so that her thighs brushed together. Between the angles of her lifted elbows, she was watching me carefully.
“Do you like me like this?”
“I.” The posture raised and modeled her breasts higher on her chest. I could feel the blood rushing into my cock. I cleared my throat. “I like you like that very much.”
“Good.”
And she stood without moving, watching me. I dropped the cola can on top of the pack it had come from and took a step toward her. Her arms unlinked and draped themselves around my shoulders, tightening across my back. I filled one hand with the soft weight of her breast, reached down with the other to the juncture of her thighs and the remembered dampness that—
“No, wait.” She pushed the lower hand away. “Not there, not yet.”
It was a tiny jarring moment, a jolt to expectations mapped out in the bubblefab two days earlier. I shrugged it off and gathered both hands to the breast I held, squeezing the nipple forward and sucking it into my mouth. She reached down and took my erection in her hand, stroking it back and forth with a touch that seemed forever on the point of letting go. I frowned, remembering a harder, more confident grip from before, and closed her hand tighter with my own. She chuckled.
“Oh sorry.”
Stumbling a little, I pushed her to the edge of the table, pulled loose of her grip, and knelt on the floor in front of her. She murmured something deep in her throat and spread her legs a little, leaning back and bracing herself on the tabletop with both hands.
“I want your mouth on me,” she said thickly.
I ran spread hands up her thighs and pressed the ball of each thumb either side of her cunt. A shiver ran through her and her lips parted. I bent my head and slid my tongue inside her. She made a tight, caught-up sound and I grinned. She felt the smile somehow and one hand slapped me across the shoulder.
“Bastard. Don’t you fucking stop, you bastard.”
I pushed her legs wider and went to work in earnest. Her hand came back to knead at my shoulder and neck and she shifted restlessly on the edge of the table, hips tilting back and forth with the motion of my tongue. The hand moved to tangle in my hair. I managed another split grin against the pressure she was exerting but this time she was too far gone to say anything coherent. She started to murmur, whether to me or herself I couldn’t tell. At first it was simply the repeated syllables of assent, but as she tightened toward climax, something else began to emerge. Lost in what I was doing, it took me time to recognize it for what it was. In the throes of orgasm, Sylvie Oshima was chanting a skein of machine code.
She finished with a hard judder and two hands crushing my head into the juncture of her thighs. I reached back and gently prised her grip away, rose to my feet against her, grinning.
And found myself face-to-face with another woman.
It was impossible to define what had changed, but Envoy sense read it out for me and the absolute knowledge behind was like an elevator dropping through my stomach.
Nadia Makita was back.
She was there in the narrowing of the eyes and the deep quirk in one corner of her mouth that didn’t belong to any expression Sylvie Oshima owned. In a kind of hunger that licked around her face like flames, and in breath that came in short, harsh bursts as if the orgasm, once spent, was now creeping back in some mirror-image replay.
“Hello there, Micky Serendipity,” she husked.
Her breathing slowed and her mouth twisted into a grin to replace the one that had just melted off my own face. She slipped off the table, reached down, and touched me between the legs. It was the old, confident grasp I remembered, but I’d lost a lot of my erection with the shock.
“Something wrong?” she murmured.
“I—” She was using both hands on me like someone gently gathering in rope. I felt myself swelling again. She watched my face.
“Something
wrong
?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said quickly.
“Good.”
She slid elegantly down on one knee, eyes still locked on mine, and took the head of my cock into her mouth. One hand stayed on the shaft, stroking, while the other found its way to my right thigh and curled around the muscle there, gripping hard.
This is fucking insane,
a cold, mission-time shard of Envoy selfhood told me.
You need to stop this right now.
And her eyes still on me, as her tongue and teeth and hand drove me into the explosion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Later, we lay draped wetly across each other in my bed, hands still loosely linked from the last frantic clasping. Our skins were sticky in patches with the mixed juices we’d spilled, and repeated climaxes had stung our muscles into lax submission. Flash images of what we’d done to and with each other kept replaying behind my eyes. I saw her crouched on top of me, crossed hands flat on my chest, pressing down hard with each movement. I saw myself slamming into her from behind. I saw her cunt descending onto my face. I saw her writhing under me, sucking wildly on the central cord of her own hair while I thrust between legs she had crooked over my hips like a vise. I saw myself taking the cord, wet with her saliva, into my own mouth as she laughed into my face and came with a powerful clenching of muscles that dragged me down after her.
But when she started talking to me, the altered lilt of her Amanglic sent an instant shiver down my spine.
“What?” She must have felt the shudder go through me.
“Nothing.”
She rolled her head to face me. I could feel her stare pinned to the side of my face like heat. “I asked you a question. What’s the matter?”
I closed my eyes briefly.
“Nadia, right?”
“Yes.”
“Nadia Makita.”
“Yes.”
I glanced sideways at her. “How the fuck did you get here, Nadia?”
“What is that, a metaphysical question?”
“No. Technological.” I propped myself up on one arm and gestured at her body. Envoy response conditioning or not, most of me was amazed at the detached sense of calm I was managing. “You can’t be unaware of what’s going on here. You live in the command software, and sometimes you get out. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess you come up through the basic instinct channels, riding the surge. Sex, maybe fear or fury, too. Stuff like that blots out a lot of the conscious mind’s functions, and that’d give you the space. But—”
“You’re some kind of expert, are you?”
“Used to be.” I watched her for reaction. “I was an Envoy once.”
“A what?”
“Doesn’t matter. What I want to know is while you’re here, what’s happened to Sylvie Oshima?”
“Who?”
“You’re wearing her fucking body, Nadia. Don’t get obtuse on me.”
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t really want to talk about this.”
“No, you probably don’t. And you know what, neither do I. But sooner or later, we’re going to have to. You know that.”
Long quiet. She opened her legs and rubbed absently at a patch of flesh on her inner thigh. She reached across and squeezed my shrunken prick. I took her hand and pushed it gently away.
“Forget it, Nadia. I’m wrung out. Even Mitzi Harlan couldn’t get another hard-on out of me tonight. It’s time to talk. Now where is Sylvie Oshima?”
She rolled away from me again.
“I’m supposed to be this woman’s keeper?” she asked bitterly. “You think I’m in control of this?”
“Maybe not. But you’ve got to have some idea.”
More quiet, but this time it quivered with tension. I waited. Finally, she rolled back to face me, eyes desperate.
“I
dream
this fucking Oshima, do you know that,” she hissed. “She’s a fucking
dream,
how am I supposed to know where she goes when I wake up?”
“Yeah, she dreams you, too, apparently.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
I sighed. “Tell me what you dream.”
“Why?”
“Because, Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.”
The eyes flared.
“All right,” she snapped. “I dream that you scare her. How’s that? I dream that she wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests. That she wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity. Or just fuck her and leave her. If you were thinking of getting your dick up this woman, Micky, or whoever the fuck you really are, I’d forget it. You’re better off sticking with me.”
I let that one soak out in silence for a moment. She flexed a smile at me.
“This the kind of thing you wanted to hear?”
I shrugged. “It’ll do to be going on with. Did you push her into the sex? To get access?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I can probably find out from her.”
“You’re assuming she’ll be back.” Another smile, more teeth this time. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
And on like that. We snapped and snarled at each other for a while longer, but beneath the weight of postcoital chemistry none of it came to anything. In the end, I gave up and sat on the outer edge of the bed, staring out toward the main room and the Hotei-lit panels on the floor. A few minutes later, I felt her hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Yeah? For what?”
“I just realized I asked for this. I mean, I asked you what you were thinking about. If I didn’t want to know, why ask, right?”
“There is that.”
“It’s just.” She hesitated. “Listen, Micky, I’m getting sleepy here. And I lied back there, I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back. I don’t know if I’ll wake up tomorrow morning or not. That’s enough to make anyone edgy, right?”
I stared at the orange-stained floor in the other room. A momentary sense of vertigo came and went. I cleared my throat.
“There’s always the amphetamine cola,” I said roughly.
“No. Sooner or later, I’ll have to sleep. It might as well be now. I’m tired, and worse than that I’m happy and relaxed. Feels like if I’ve got to go, this’ll do. It’s only chemical, I know, but I can’t hold out against it forever. And I think I will be back. Something’s telling me that. But right now I don’t know when, and I don’t know where I’m going. And that scares me. Could you.” Another pause. I heard the click as she swallowed in the quiet. “Would you mind holding me while I go under?”
Orange moonlight on a worn and darkened floor.
I reached back for her hand.
• • •
Like most of the combat custom I’d ever worn, the Eishundo sleeve came fitted with an internal wake-up. At the hour I’d fixed in my head, whatever dreams I was having coalesced into the rising rim of a tropical sun over quiet waters. Scent of fruit and coffee drifting from somewhere unseen and the cheerful murmur of voices far off. The cool of sand at early morning under my naked feet, and a faint but persistent breeze in my face. Sound of breakers
Vchira Beach? Already?
My hands were balled in the pockets of faded surfslacks, traces of sand in the lining of the pockets that—
The sense impressions vanished abruptly as I woke up. No coffee, and no beach to drink it on. No sand under my feet or my uncurling fingers. There was sunlight, but it was altogether thinner than in the wake-up imaging, strained colorlessly through the windows in the other room and into a gray, downward-pressing quiet.
I turned over gingerly and looked at the face of the woman sleeping next to me. She didn’t move. I remembered the fear in Nadia Makita’s eyes the night before as she let herself slide fractions at a time into sleep. Increments of consciousness slipping like taut rope through her hands and away, and then stopped as she flinched and blinked herself awake again. And then the moment, abrupt and unawaited, when she let go completely and didn’t come back. Now I lay and watched the peace on her face as she slept, and it didn’t help.
I slid out of bed and dressed quietly in the other room. I didn’t want to be around when she woke up.
I certainly didn’t want to wake her myself.
Dig 301 shaded into existence opposite me and opened her mouth. Combat neurachem got there first. I made a slicing gesture across my own throat and jerked a thumb back at the bedroom. Swept up my jacket from the back of a chair, shouldered my way into it, and nodded at the door.
“Outside,” I murmured.
Outside, the day was shaping up better than its first impressions. The sun was wintry, but you could get warm if you stood in its rays directly, and the cloud cover was starting to break up. Daikoku stood like the ghost of a scimitar blade to the southwest and there was a column of specks circling slowly out over the ocean, ripwings at a guess. Down below, a couple of vessels were visible at the limits of my unaided vision. Tekitomura made a backdrop mutter in the still air. I yawned and looked at the amphetamine cola in my hand, then tucked it into my jacket. I was as awake as I wanted to be right now.
“So what did you want?” I asked the construct beside me.
“I thought you would like to know that the site has visitors.”
The neurachem slammed online. Time turned to sludge around me as the Eishundo sleeve went to combat aware. I was staring sideways in disbelief at Dig 301 when the first blast cut past me. I saw the flare of disrupted air where it came through the construct’s projected presence and then I was spinning away sideways as my jacket caught fire.
“Motherfu—”
No gun, no knife. I’d left them both inside. No time to reach the door, and Envoy instinct kicked me away from it anyway. Later, I’d realize what the situational intuition already knew—going back inside was a bolt-hole suicide. Jacket still in flames, I tumbled into the cover of the cabin wall. The blaster beam flashed again, nowhere near me. They were firing at Dig 301 again, misreading her for a solid human target.
Not exactly ninja-grade combat skills
flashed through my mind.
These guys are the local hired help.
Yeah, but they have guns and you don’t.
Time to change arenas.
Fire-retardant material in my jacket had the flames down to smoke and heat across my ribs. The scorched fibers oozed damping polymer. I drew one hard breath and sprinted.
Yells behind me, boiling instantly from disbelief to anger. Maybe they thought they’d taken me down with the first shot; maybe they just weren’t all that bright. It took them a pair of seconds to start shooting. By then I was almost to the next cabin. Blaster fire crackled in my ears. Heat flared close to my hip and my flesh cringed. I flinched sideways, got the cabin at my back, and scanned the ground ahead.
Three more cabins, gathered in a rough arc on the ground quarried out by the original archaeologues. Beyond them, the eyrie lifted off into the sky from massive cantilevered supports, like some vast premillennial rocket poised for launch. I hadn’t been inside the day before; there was altogether too much abrupt space underfoot and a straight drop five hundred meters to the slanted mountainside below. But I knew from previous experience what the alien perspectives of Martian architecture could do to human perceptions, and I knew the Envoy conditioning would hold up.
Local hired help. Hold that thought.
They’d come in after me hesitantly at best, confused by the dizzying swoop of the interior, maybe even spiked with a little superstitious dread if I was lucky. They’d be off balance, they’d be afraid.
They’d make mistakes.
Which made the eyrie a perfect killing ground.
I bolted across the remaining open space, slipped between two of the cabins, and made for the nearest outcropping of Martian alloy, where it rose out of the rock like a tree root five meters thick. The archaeologues had left a set of metal steps bolted into the ground beside it. I took them three at a time and stepped onto the outcropping, boots slithering on alloy the color of bruises. I steadied myself against a bas-relief technoglyph facing that formed the side of the closest cantilever support as it extended outward into the air. The support was at least ten meters high, but a couple of meters to my left there was a ladder epoxied to the bas-relief surface. I grabbed a rung and started climbing.
More shouts from back among the cabins. No shooting. It sounded as if they were checking corners, but I didn’t have the time to crank up the neurachem and make sure. Sweat jumped from my hands as the ladder creaked and shifted under my weight. The epoxy hadn’t taken well to the Martian alloy. I doubled my speed, reached the top, and swung off with a tiny grunt of relief. Then I lay flat on top of the cantilever support, breathing and listening. Neurachem brought me the sounds of a badly organized search thrashing about below. Someone was trying to shoot the lock off one of the cabins. I stared up at the sky and thought about it for a moment.
“Dig? You there?” Voice a murmur.
“I am in communication range, yes.” The construct’s words seemed to come out of the air beside my ear. “You need speak no louder than you are. I assume from the situational context you do not wish me to become visible in your vicinity.”
“You assume right. What I would like you to do is, on my command, become visible inside one of the locked-up cabins down there. Better yet, more than one if you can handle multiple projections. Can you do that?”
“I am enabled for one-to-one interaction up to and including every member of the original Dig Three-oh-one team at any given time, plus a guest potential of seven.” It was hard to tell at this volume, but there seemed to be a trace of amusement in the construct’s voice. “This gives me a total capacity of sixty-two separate representations.”
“Yeah, well, three or four should do for now.” I rolled with painstaking care onto my front. “And, listen, can you project as me?”
“No. I can choose among an index of personality projections, but I am not able to alter them in any way.”
“You have any males?”
“Yes, though fewer options than—”
“All right, that’s fine. Just choose a few out of the index that look like me. Male, about my build.”
“When do you wish this to commence?”
I got my hands positioned under me.
“Now.”
“Commencing.”
It took a couple of seconds, and then chaos erupted among the cabins below. Blaster fire crackled back and forth, punctuated with shouts of warning and the sound of running feet. Fifteen meters above it all, I pushed hard with both hands, came up in a crouch, and then exploded into the sprint.
The cantilever arm ran out fifty-odd meters over empty space, then buried itself seamlessly in the main body of the eyrie. Wide oval entrances gaped at the join. The dig team had attempted to attach a safety rail along the top of the arm, but as with the ladder the epoxy hadn’t done well over time. In places the cabling had torn loose and now hung over the sides; elsewhere it was simply gone. I grimaced and narrowed focus to the broad flange at the end where the arm joined the main structure. Held the sprint.