He clicked his tongue, barely audible above the fusion beat outside.
“Both of you. Tanaseda wants your head on a stick for what you did to Yukio, but you’re not the main attraction.”
I nodded bleakly. For a while I’d thought Sylvie must have somehow given herself away down in Tekitomura yesterday. Talked to the wrong person, been caught on the wrong surveillance cam, done something to bring the pursuit team crashing down on us like angelfire. But it wasn’t that. It was simpler and worse—they’d vectored in on my own unshielded blunder through the Quellcrist Falconer archives. Must have had a global watch on the dataflows since this whole fucking mess blew up.
And you walked right into it. Nice going.
I grimaced. “And is Tanaseda running this?”
Plex hesitated.
“No? So who’s reeling his line in then?”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t back up on me, Plex.”
“Look, I don’t fucking know. I don’t. But it’s up the food chain, I know that. First Families is what I hear, some Millsport court spymistress.”
I felt a qualified sense of relief. Not the yakuza, then. Nice to know my market value hadn’t fallen
that
far.
“This spymistress got a name?”
“Yeah.” He got up abruptly and went to the hospitality module. Stared down into the smashed interior. “Name of Aiura. Real hardcase by all accounts.”
“You haven’t met her?”
He poked about in the debris I’d left, found an undamaged pipe. “No. I don’t even get to see Tanaseda these days. No way I’d be let inside something at First Families level. But there’s stuff about this Aiura on the court gossip circuit. She’s got a reputation.”
I snorted. “Yeah, don’t they all.”
“I’m serious, Tak.” He fired up the pipe and looked reproachfully at me through the sudden smoke. “I’m trying to help you here. You remember that mess about sixty years ago, when Mitzi Harlan wound up in a Kossuth skullwalk porn flick?”
“Vaguely.” I’d been busy at the time, stealing bioware and offworld databonds in the company of Virginia Vidaura and the Little Blue Bugs. High-yield criminality masquerading as political commitment. We watched the news for word of the police efforts at pursuit, not much else. There hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the incessant scandals and misdemeanors of Harlan’s World’s aristo larvae.
“Yeah, well, the word is that this Aiura ran damage limitation and cleanup for the Harlan family. Closed down the studio with extreme prejudice, hunted down everyone involved. I heard most of them got the skyride. She took them up to Rila Crags at night, strapped them to a grav pack each, and just flipped the switch.”
“Very elegant.”
Plex drew his lungs full of smoke and gestured. His voice came out squeaky.
“Way she is, apparently. Old school, you know.”
“You got any idea where she got the copy of me from?”
He shook his head. “No, but I’d guess Protectorate military storage. He’s young, a lot younger than you. Are now, I mean.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Yeah, they hauled me in for an interview last month when he first got up here from Millsport. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they talk. He’s still calling himself an Envoy.”
I grimaced again.
“He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—”
“Yeah, all right, he’s young. Got it. Did he say anything about me?”
“Not really, mostly he just asked questions and listened. Only.” Plex drew on the pipe again. “I got the impression he was, I don’t know, disappointed or something. About what you were doing these days.”
I felt my eyes narrow. “He said that?”
“No, no.” Plex waved the pipe, trickled smoke from his nose and mouth. “Just an impression I got, ’s all.”
I nodded. “Okay, one last question. You said they took her to Millsport. Where?”
Another pause. I shot him a curious look.
“Come on, what have you got to lose now? Where are they taking her?”
“Tak, let it go. This is just like the sweeper bar, all over again. You’re getting involved in something that doesn’t—”
“I’m already involved, Plex. Tanaseda’s taken care of that.”
“No, listen. Tanaseda will deal. You’ve got Yukio’s stack, man. You could negotiate for its safe return. He’ll do it, I
know
him. He and Hirayasu senior go back a century or more. He’s Yukio’s
sempai,
he’s practically his adoptive uncle. He’ll have to cut a deal.”
“And you think this Aiura’s going to let it go at that?”
“Sure, why not.” Plex gestured with the pipe. “She’s got what she wants. As long as you stay out of—”
“Plex, think about it. I’m double-sleeved. That’s a UN rap, big-time penalties for all involved. Not to mention the issue of whether they’re even entitled to hold a stored copy of a serving Envoy in the first place. If the Protectorate ever finds out about this, Aiura the spymistress is going to be looking at some serious storage, First Families connections or not. The sun’ll be a fucking red dwarf by the time they let her out.”
Plex snorted. “You think so? You really think the UN are going to come out here and risk upsetting the local oligarchy for the sake of one double-sleeving?”
“If it’s made public enough, yes. They’ll have to. They can’t be seen to do anything else. Believe me, Plex, I know, I used to do this for a living. The whole Protectorate system hangs together on an assumption that no one dare step out of line. As soon as someone does, and gets away with it, no matter how small that initial transgression, it’ll be like the first crack in the dam wall. If what’s been done here becomes common knowledge, the Protectorate will have to demand Aiura’s cortical stack on a plate. And if the First Families don’t comply, the UN will send the Envoys, because a refusal by local oligarchy to comply can only be read one way, as insurrection. And insurrections get put down, wherever they are, at whatever cost, without fail.”
I watched him, watched it sink in as it had sunk into me when I first heard the news in Drava. The understanding of what had been done, the step that had been taken, and the sequence of inevitability that we were all now locked into. The fact that there was no way back from this situation that didn’t involve someone called Takeshi Kovacs dying for good.
“This Aiura,” I said quietly, “has backed herself into a corner. I would love to know why, I would love to know what it was that was so fucking important it was worth this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. One of us has to go, me or him, and the easiest way for her to make that happen is to keep sending him after me until either he kills me or I kill him.”
He looked back at me, pupils blasted wide with the mix of whiff and mushrooms, pipe forgotten and trailing faint fumes from the cupped bowl of his hand. Like it was all too much to take in. Like I was a piece of
take
hallucination that refused to morph into something more pleasant or just go away.
I shook my head. Tried to get Sylvie’s Slipins out of it.
“So like I said, Plex, I need to know. I
really
need to know. Oshima, Aiura, and Kovacs. Where do I find these people?”
He shook his head. “It’s no good, Tak. I mean, I’ll tell you. You really want to know, I’ll tell you. But it isn’t going to help. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no way you can—”
“Why don’t you just tell me, Plex. Get it off your chest. Let me worry about the logistics.”
So he told me. And I did the logistics, and worried at it.
All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reefdive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.
PART THREE
THAT WAS A WHILE AGO
That Quell, sure, man, she got something going on,
something you gotta think about. Thing is, some things last,
some things don’t, but sometimes you got something don’t
last won’t be because it’s gone, be because it’s waiting for its
time to come again, maybe waiting on a change. Music’s like
that, and so is life, man, so is life.DIZZY CSANGO
from an interview for
New Sky Blue
magazine
CHAPTER TWENTY
There were storm warnings all the way south.
On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout. Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8 G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems, and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.
This one had been building for a while—I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava—and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbors among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the Gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.
The skipper of the
Haiduci’s Daughter
took it philosophically.
“Seen worse,” he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge. “Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.”
I grunted noncommittally. He squinted away from the display at me.
“You were away then, right?”
“Yeah, offworld.”
He laughed raspingly. “Yeah, that’s right. All that exotic travel you been doing. So when do I get to see your pretty face on KossuthNet, then? Got a one-to-one lined up with Maggie Sugita when we get in?”
“Give me time, man.”
“More time? Haven’t you had enough
time
yet?”
It was the line of banter we’d maintained all the way down from Tekitomura. Like quite a few freight skippers I’d met, Ari Japaridze was a shrewd but relatively unimaginative man. He knew next to nothing about me, which, he told me, was the way he liked things to stay with his passengers, but he was nobody’s fool. And it didn’t take an archaeologue to work out that if a man comes aboard your raddled old freighter an hour before it leaves and offers as much for a cramped crewroom berth as you’d pay for a Saffron Line cabin—well, that man probably isn’t on friendly terms with law enforcement. For Japaridze, the holes he’d turned up in my knowledge of the last couple of decades on Harlan’s World had a very simple explanation. I’d been away, in the time-honored criminal sense of the word. I countered this assumption with the simple truth about my absence and got the rasping laugh every time.
Which suited me fine. People will believe what they want to believe—look at the fucking Beards—and I got the distinct impression that there was some storage time in Japaridze’s past. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but I got an invite up to the bridge on our second evening out of Tekitomura, and by the time we left Erkezes on the southernmost tip of the Saffron Archipelago we were swapping notes on preferred Newpest drinking holes and how best to barbecue bottleback steaks.
I tried not to let the time chafe at me.
Tried not to think about the Millsport Archipelago and the long westward arc we were cutting away from it.
Sleep was hard.
The nighttime bridge of the
Haiduci’s Daughter
provided a viable alternative. I sat with Japaridze and drank cheap Millsport blended whiskey, watching as the freighter plowed her way south into warmer seas and air that was fragrant with the scent of belaweed. I talked, as automatic as the machines that kept the vessel on her curving course, stock tales of sex and travel, memories of Newpest and the Kossuth hinterlands. I massaged the muscles of my left arm where they still ached and throbbed. I flexed my left hand against the pain it gave me. Beneath it all, I thought about ways to kill Aiura and myself.
By day, I prowled the decks and mingled with the other passengers as little as possible. They were an unappealing bunch anyway, three burned-out and bitter-talking deComs heading south, maybe for home, maybe just for the sun; a hard-eyed webjelly entrepreneur and his bodyguard, accompanying an oil shipment to Newpest; a young New Revelation priest and his carefully wrapped wife, who joined ship at Erkezes. Another half a dozen less memorable men and women who kept to themselves even more than I did and looked away whenever they were spoken to.
A certain degree of social interaction was unavoidable.
Haiduci’s Daughter
was a small vessel, in essence not much more than a tug welded onto the nose of four duplex freight pods and a powerful hoverload driver. Access gantries ran at two levels from the forward decks between and alongside the pods and back to a narrow observation bubble bolted onto the rear. What living space there was felt crowded. There were a few squabbles early on, including one over stolen food that Japaridze had to break up with threats of putting people off at Erkezes, but by the time we left the Saffron Archipelago behind, everybody had pretty much settled down. I had a couple of forced conversations with the deComs over meals, trying to show interest in their hard-luck stories and life-in-the-Uncleared bravado. From the webjelly oil merchant I got repetitive lectures on the economic benefits that would emerge from the Mecsek regime’s austerity program. The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterward.
We made good time from Erkezes to the Gulf, and there was no sign of a storm when we got there. I found myself crowded out of my usual brooding spots as the other passengers came out to enjoy the novelty of warm weather and sun strong enough to tan. You couldn’t blame them—the sky was a solid blue from horizon to horizon, Daikoku and Hotei both showing clear and high up. A strong breeze out of the northeast kept the heat pleasant and lifted spray from the ruffled surface of the sea. Westward, waves broke white and just audible on the great curving reefs that heralded the eventual rise of the Kossuth Gulf coastline farther south.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said a quiet voice beside me at the rail.
I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realized, several months pregnant.
I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.
Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.
“I’ve never traveled this far south before,” she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. “Have you?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it always this hot?”
I looked at her again, bleakly. “It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.”
“Ah.” She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. “You do not approve?”
I shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.”
“Mecsek.” She made a small spitting sound. “He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.”
“Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonoring him.”
She flinched.
“You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—”
“Four.” I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. “I’m talking about
four
isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.”
I saw color rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.
“The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,” she murmured. “Many of us—”
“Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your gynocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.”
Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.
“You misjudge me.” She touched the scarf she wore. “I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.”
“Then you’re more stupid than you look.”
An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.
“So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—”
“Look,” I said coldly. “Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.”
“See,” she said, voice turned slightly shrill. “You lust after her like all the others. You give in to her cheap sensual tricks and—”
“Oh
please.
For my money, Mitzi Harlan’s a stupid, superficial little trollop, but you know what? At least she lives her life as if it belongs to her. Instead of abasing herself at the feet of any fucking baboon who can grow a beard and some external genitalia.”
“Are you calling my husband a—”
“No.” I swung on her. It seemed I didn’t have it cranked down after all. My hands shot out and grasped her by the shoulders. “No, I’m calling
you
a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But
you
? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I
really
do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her
to the same fucking thing.
”
Then there was a hand on my arm.
“Hey, man.” It was one of the deComs, backed up by the entrepreneur’s bodyguard. He looked scared but determined. “That’s enough. Leave her alone.”
I looked at his fingers, where they hung on my elbow. I wondered briefly about breaking them, locking out the arm behind them and—
A memory flared to life inside me. My father shaking my mother by the shoulders like a belaweed rack that wouldn’t come loose of its mooring, screaming abuse and whiskey fumes into her face. Seven years old, I’d gone for his arm and tried to tug it away.
He’d clouted me almost absently that time, across the room and into a corner. Gone back to her.
I unlocked my hands from the woman’s shoulders. Shook off the deCom’s grip. Mentally shook myself by the throat.
“Now back off, man.”
“Sure,” I said it quietly. “Like I said, sister. ’S a free world. Got nothing to do with me.”
• • •
The storm clipped us around the ear a couple of hours later. A long trailing scarf of bad weather that darkened the sky outside my porthole and caught the
Haiduci’s Daughter
broadside-on. I was flat on my back in my bunk at the time, staring at the metal-gray ceiling and giving myself a furious lecture on undesirable involvement. I heard the engine thrum kick up a notch and guessed Japaridze was pulling more buoyancy from the grav system. A couple of minutes later the narrow cabin space seemed to lurch sideways; on the table opposite a glass slid a couple of centimeters before the antispill surface gripped it in place. The water it held slopped alarmingly and splashed over the edge. I sighed and got off the bunk, bracing myself across the cabin and leaning down to peer out the porthole. Sudden rain slapped the glass.
Somewhere in the freighter, an alarm went off.
I frowned. It seemed an extreme response to what wasn’t much more than some choppy water. I shouldered my way into a light jacket I’d bought from one of the freighter’s crew members, stowed Tebbit knife and Rapsodia beneath it, and slipped out into the corridor.
Getting involved again, are we?
Hardly. If this tub is going to sink, I want advance warning.
I followed the alarms up to main deck level and out into the rain. A member of the crew passed me, hefting a clumsy long-barrel blaster.
“ ’S going on?” I asked her.
“Search me, sam.” She spared me a grim look, jerked her head aft. “Main board’s showing a breach in cargo. Maybe a ripwing trying to get in out of the storm. Maybe not.”
“You want a hand?”
She hesitated, suspicion swimming momentarily on her face, then made a decision. Maybe Japaridze had said something to her about me, maybe she just liked my recently acquired face. Or maybe she was just scared and could use the company.
“Sure. Thanks.”
We worked our way back toward the cargo pods and along one of the gantries, bracing ourselves each time the freighter rolled. Rain whipped in at odd, wind-driven angles. The alarm shrilled querulously over the weather. Ahead, in the sudden, sullen gloom of the squall, a row of red lights pulsed on and off along one section of the left-hand freight pod. Below the flashing alert signals, pale light showed from the edge of a cracked hatch. The crew-woman hissed and gestured with the blaster barrel.
“That’s it.” She started forward. “Someone’s in there.”
I shot her a glance. “Or something. Ripwings, right?”