I was seeing it for the second time. Still, the rage leapt up through me like flames. In my palms, the gecko spines sweated awake.
A second enforcer appeared in the doorway, saw what was going on, and bellowed in furious Japanese. The thug leapt away from the woman on the floor. He made a nervous bow, a stammered apology. The newcomer stepped in close and backhanded the man three times with shattering force. The thug cowered against the wall. More yelling from the newcomer. Amid some of the more colorful insults I’d ever heard in Japanese, he was telling someone to bring clothes for the captive.
By the time Kovacs got back from overseeing the hunt for himself, they had her dressed and seated on a chair in the center of the cabin’s main living space. Her hands rested in her lap, wrists bound neatly, one over the other with a restraint patch you couldn’t see. The yakuza stood at a careful distance from her, weapons still out. The would-be romantic sulked in a corner, disarmed, one side of his mouth swollen, upper lip split. Kovacs’s eyes flickered over the damage, and he turned to the enforcer at his side. A muttered exchange the microcams were not amped to pick up. He nodded, looked again at the woman before him. I read a curious hesitation in his stance.
Then he turned back to the cabin door.
“Anton, you want to come in here?”
The Skull Gang command head stepped into the room. When the woman saw him, her mouth twisted.
“You fucking sellout piece of shit.”
Anton’s lip curled, but he said nothing.
“You know each other, I believe.” But there was a faint question in Kovacs’s voice, and he was still watching the woman before him.
Sylvie tipped her gaze at him. “Yeah, I know this asshole. And? Got something to do with you, has it, fuckhead?”
He stared at her, and I tensed in my chair. This segment was first time through for me, and I didn’t know what he’d do. What would I have done at that age? No, scratch that. What was I about to do at that age? My mind fled back through the silted-up decades of violence and rage, trying to anticipate.
But he only smiled.
“No, Mistress Oshima. It has nothing to do with me anymore. You are a package I have to deliver in good condition, that’s all.”
Someone muttered; someone else guffawed. Still cranked tight, my neurachem hearing caught a crude joke about packages. In the coil, my younger self paused. His eyes flickered to the man with the broken lip.
“You. Come here.”
The enforcer didn’t want to. You could see it in his stance. But he was yakuza, and in the end it’s all face with them. He straightened up, met Kovacs’s eyes, and stepped forward with a filed-tooth sneer. Kovacs looked back at him neutrally and nodded.
“Show me your right hand.”
The yakuza tipped his head to one side, gaze still locked on Kovacs’s eyes. It was a gesture of pure insolence. He flipped up his hand, extended fingers, making it a loosely bent blade. He inclined his head again, the other way, still staring deep into this
tani
piece of shit’s eyes.
Kovacs moved like whiplash on a broken trawler cable.
He snatched the offered hand at the wrist and twisted downward, blocking the other man’s response options with his body. He held the captured arm straight out and his other hand arced over the wrestling lock of both bodies, blaster pointed. A beam flared and sizzled.
The enforcer shrieked as his hand went up in flames. The blaster must have been powered down—most beam weapons will take a limb clean off, vaporized across the width of the blast. This one had only burned away skin and flesh to the bone and tendon. Kovacs held the man a moment longer, then turned him loose with an elbow-strike cuff across the side of the head. The enforcer collapsed across the floor with his scorched hand clamped under his armpit and his trousers visibly stained. He was weeping uncontrollably.
Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.
“Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a
god
to you.
Is that clear?
”
Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing-down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.
“Mistress Oshima. If you’d like to follow me, please.”
She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and followed him out of the cabin. The yakuza filed after them, leaving their captain and the man on the floor. The captain stared at his injured enforcer for a moment, then booted him savagely in the ribs, spat on him, and stalked out.
Outside, they’d loaded the three men I’d killed in the eyrie onto a fold-down grav stretcher rack. The yakuza captain detailed a man to drive it, then took point ahead of a protective phalanx around Kovacs and Sylvie. Beside and behind the stretcher rack, Anton and the four remaining members of the Skull Gang formed up into a lax rear guard. Dig’s outdoor microcams followed the little procession out of sight along the path down to Tekitomura.
Stumbling fifty meters behind them all, still nursing his ruined and as-yet-untreated hand, came the disgraced enforcer who had dared to touch Sylvie Oshima.
I watched him go, trying to make sense of it.
Trying to make it fit.
I was still trying when Dig 301 asked if I was finished, if I wanted to see something else. I told her no, absently. In my head, Envoy intuition was already doing what needed to be done.
Setting fire to my preconceptions and burning them to the ground.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The lights were all out in Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-six when I got there, but in a unit half a dozen bays down on the right, the upper-level windows glowed fitfully, as if the place were on fire inside. There was a frenetic hybrid reefdive-neojunk rhythm blasting out into the night, even through the cranked-down loading bay shutter, and three thickset figures stood around outside in dark coats, breathing steam and flapping their arms against the cold. Plex Kohei might have the floor space to throw big dance parties, but it didn’t look as if he could afford machine security on the door. This was going to be easier than I’d expected.
Always assuming Plex was actually there.
Are you kidding me?
Isa’s fifteen-year-old Millsport-accented scorn down the line when I phoned her late that afternoon.
Of
course
he’ll be in. What day is it?
Uh.
I estimated.
Friday?
Right, Friday. So what do the local yokels do up there on a Friday?
Fuck should I know, Isa? And don’t be such a metrosnob.
Uh, Friday? Hello? Fishing community? Ebisu night?
He’s having a party.
He’s cranking some credit out of cheap floor space and good
take
connections, is what he’s doing,
she drawled.
All those warehouses. All those family friends in the yak.
Don’t suppose you’d know which warehouse exactly?
Stupid question. Picking my way through the fractal street planning of the warehouse district hadn’t been my idea of fun, but once I hit Belacotton Kohei Section, it hadn’t been hard to find my way to the party—you could hear the music across half a dozen alleys in every direction.
Don’t suppose I would.
Isa yawned down the line. I guessed she’d not been out of bed that long.
Say, Kovacs. You been pissing people off up there?
No. Why?
Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t really be telling you this for nothing. But seeing as how we go back.
I stifled a grin. Isa and I went back all of a year and a half. When you’re fifteen I guess that’s a long time.
Yeah?
Yeah, been a lot of big heat down here, asking after you. Paying big for answers, too. So if you’re not already, I’d start looking over the shoulder of that deep-voiced new sleeve you’ve got yourself there.
I frowned and thought about it.
What kind of big heat?
If I knew that, you’d have to pay me for it. But as it happens, I don’t. Only players talked to me were bent Millsport PD, and them you can buy for the price of an Angel Wharf blowjob. Anybody could have sent them.
And I don’t suppose you told them anything about me.
Don’t suppose I did. You planning on soaking up this line much longer, Kovacs? Only, I’m not like you. I have a social life.
No, I’m gone. Thanks for the newsflash, Isa.
She grunted.
My clit-tingling pleasure. You stay in one piece, maybe we get to do some more business I can charge you for.
I pressed the sealseam of my newly acquired coat closed to the collar, flexed my hands inside the black polalloy gloves—spike of brief agony from the left—and poured gangster attitude into my stride as I came around the curve of the alley. Think Yukio Hirayasu at his most youthfully arrogant. Ignore the fact the coat wasn’t hand-tailored—straight-to-street off-the-rack branded was the best I could do at short notice, a garment the real Hirayasu wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But it was a rich matte black to match the sprayon gloves and, in this light, it should pass. Envoy deceit would do the rest.
I’d thought briefly about crashing Plex’s party the hard way. Going in heavy against the door, or maybe scaling the back of the warehouse and cracking a skylight entry. But my left arm was still a single throbbing ache from fingertip to neck, and I didn’t know how far I could trust it to do what I wanted in a critical situation.
The door detail saw me coming and drew together. Neurachem vision calibrated them for me at distance—cheap, wharf-front muscle, maybe some very basic combat augmentation in the way they moved. One of them had a tactical marine tattoo across his cheek, but that could have been a knockoff, courtesy of some parlor with army-surplus software. Or, like a lot of tacs, he could just have fallen on postdemob hard times. Downsizing. The universal catchall and catechism on Harlan’s World these days. Nothing was more sacred than cost cutting, and even the military weren’t entirely safe.
“Hold it, sam.”
It was the one with the tattoo. I cut him a withering glance. Halted, barely.
“I have an appointment with Plex Kohei. I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”
“Appointment?” His gaze lifted and slipped left, checking a retinal guest list. “Not tonight you don’t. Man’s busy.”
I let my eyes widen, built the volcanic pressure of fury the way I’d seen it from the yak captain in Dig 301’s footage.
“Do you know who I am?” I barked.
The tattooed doorman shrugged. “I know I don’t see your face on this list. And around here, that means you don’t get in.”
At my side, the others were looking me up and down with professional interest. Seeing what they could break easily. I fought down the impulse to take up a fighting stance and eyed them with mannered disdain instead. Launched the bluff.
“Very well. You will please inform your employer that you have turned Yukio Hirayasu from his door, and that thanks to your
diligence
in this matter, he will now speak to me in
sempai
Tanaseda’s presence tomorrow morning, unadvised and thus unprepared.”
Gazes flew back and forth between the three of them. It was the names, the whiff of authentic yakuza clout. The spokesman hesitated. I turned away. Was only midway through the motion when he made up his mind, and broke.
“All right. Hirayasu-san. Just one moment please.”
The great thing about organized crime is the level of fear it likes to maintain among its minions and those who associate with them. Thug hierarchy. You can see the same pattern on any of a dozen different worlds—the Hun Home triads, Adoracion’s
familias vigilantes,
the Provo Crews on Nkrumah’s Land. Regional variations, but they all sow the same crop of respect through terror of retribution. And all reap the same harvest of stunted initiative in the ranks. No one wants to take an independent decision, when independent action runs the risk of reinterpretation as a lack of respect. Shit like that can get you Really Dead.
Better, by far, to fall back on hierarchy. The doorman dug out his phone and punched up his boss.
“Listen, Plex, we’ve—”
He listened a moment himself, face immobile. Angry insect sounds from the phone. I didn’t need neurachem to work out what was being said.
“Uh, yeah, I know you said that, man. But I’ve got Yukio Hirayasu out here wanting a word, and I—”
Another break, but this time the doorkeep seemed happier. He nodded a couple of times, described me and what I’d just said. At the other end of the line, I could hear Plex dithering. I gave it a couple of moments, then snapped my fingers impatiently and gestured for the phone. The doorman caved in and handed it over. I mustered Hirayasu’s speech patterns from memory a couple of months old, colored in what I didn’t know with standard Millsport gangster idiom.
“Plex.” Grim impatience.
“Uh. Yukio? That really you?”
I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. “No, I’m a fucking
ledgedust
dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.”
“Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were
gone.
”
“Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”
“Tana—” Plex swallowed audibly. “Is Tanaseda here?”
“Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.”
“All over what?”
“All over
what
?” I cranked the yelp again. “What do you fucking think?”
I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.
“I thought they—”
“Are you going to fucking let me in or what?”
The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep, and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.
Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport
take
scene—translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport
take
clubs. Isa, I guessed, would not have been impressed.
A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, around the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood-warm. The music got even louder.
We forged through the tightly packed dance space without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissed-out vacant. The
take
scene is pretty laid-back wherever you go on Harlan’s World—careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum, and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amid incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody outside the military wants them.
A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirrorwood paneling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad, and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.
I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automold bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful; wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint, and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had gotten them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dance space image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognizable enough to dance to. Or whatever.
“Hey, Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.” Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. “That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom-grown?”
I nodded at his playmates. “Get rid of them.”
“Uh, sure.” He turned back to the automold and clapped his hands. “Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.”
They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.
“Yeah, him, too.”
The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at Plex, who was moving toward a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the sidewall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous,
take
and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.
“Uh, you want a pipe, man?”
“Plex.” I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. “Just what the
fuck
is going on?”
He flinched. Stuttered.
“I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—”
“
Fuck
that, Plex. Talk to me.”
“Look, man, it’s not my fault.” His tone worked toward aggrieved. “Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that
kaikyo
shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I
know
biotech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was
fucked up.
”
So.
My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio.
Kaikyo
—a strait, a stolen-goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.