An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.
It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right—all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some unnoticed moment during my time in the Corps.
But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.
I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.
On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked southeast where the dark was gathering, approximately toward Newpest.
I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.
Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half a dozen meters away. I edged around to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good meter from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction, and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.
“Fuck are you looking at?”
For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings, and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.
“I’m not going to see them,” I told it after a while. “So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.”
But still, in the fast-growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.
Like not being alone.
The ripwing and I sat hunched six meters apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
We pulled into Newpest harbor a little after noon the next day and crept to a mooring with painstaking care. The whole port was jammed up with hoverloaders and other vessels fleeing the threat of heavy weather in the eastern Gulf, and the harbormaster software had arranged them according to some counterintuitive mathematical scheme that the
Haiduci’s Daughter
didn’t have an interface for. Japaridze took the con on manual, cursing machines in general and the Port Authority AI in particular as we wound our way through the apparently random thickets of shipping.
“Fucking upgrade this, upgrade that. If I’d wanted to be a fucking techhead, I would have gotten a job with deCom.”
Like me, he had a slight but insistent hangover.
We said our farewells on the bridge, and I went down to the foredeck. I tossed my pack ashore while the autograpples were still cranking us in, and leapt the closing gap to the wharf from the rail. It got me a couple of glances from bystanders but no uniformed attention. With a circling storm out on the horizon and a harbor packed to capacity, port security had other things to worry about than reckless disembarkation. I picked up the pack, slung it on one shoulder, and drifted into the sparse flow of pedestrians along the wharf. The heat settled on me wetly. In a couple of minutes I was off the waterfront, streaming sweat and flagging down an autocab.
“Inland harbor,” I told it. “Charter terminal, and hurry.”
The cab made a U-turn and plunged back into the main crosstown thoroughfares. Newpest unfolded around me.
It’s changed a lot in the couple of centuries I’ve been coming back to it. The town I grew up in was low lying, like the land it was built on, sprawling in stormproofed snub profile units and superbubbles across the isthmus between the sea and the great clogged lake that would later become the Weed Expanse. Back then Newpest carried the fragrance of belaweed and the stink of the various industrial processes it was subject to like the mix of perfume and body odor on a cheap whore. You couldn’t get away from either without leaving town.
So much for youthful reminiscence.
As the Unsettlement receded into history, a return to relative prosperity brought new growth, out along the inner shore of the Expanse and the long curve of the coastline, and upward into the tropical sky. The height of the buildings in central Newpest soared, rising on the back of increased confidence in storm management technology and a burgeoning, moneyed middle class who needed to live near their investments but didn’t want to have to smell them. By the time I joined the Envoys, environmental legislation had started to take the edge off the air at ground level and there were skyscrapers downtown to rival anything you could find in Millsport.
After that my visits were infrequent, and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice when exactly the trend started to reverse and why. All I knew was that now there were quarters of the southern city where the stink was back, and the brave new developments along the coast and the Expanse were collapsing, kilometer by kilometer, into creeping shantytown decay. In the center, there were beggars on the streets and armed security outside most of the large buildings. Looking out of the side window of the autocab, I caught an echo of irritated tension in the way people moved that hadn’t been there forty years before.
We crossed the center in a raised priority lane that sent the digits on the cab meter spinning into a blur. It didn’t last long—aside from one or two glossy limos and a scattering of cabs, we had the vaulted road to ourselves, and when we picked up the main Expanse highway on the other side, the charge count settled down to a reasonable rate. We curled away from the high-rise zone and out across the shanties. Low-level housing, pressed up close to the carriageway. This story I already knew from Segesvar. The cleared embankment space on either side of the road had been sold off while I was away and previous health and safety restrictions waived. I caught a glimpse of a naked two-year-old child gripping the wire fence around a flat roof, mesmerized by the blastpast of the traffic two meters from her face. On another roof farther along, two kids not much older hurled makeshift missiles that missed and fell bouncing in our wake.
The inland harbor exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes, and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighborhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the program ran that way—maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway—steel-boned and up-jutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.
We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock, and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly colored holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.
“You for hire?”
He turned lackluster eyes on me without lifting his head.
“Mama.”
I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalize. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.
“Where you want to go?”
“Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.”
He smirked. “Yeah, Vchira Beach—it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam.
Where
on Vchira Beach?”
“Southern reach. The Strip.”
“Sourcetown.” His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. “You a surfer?”
“Do I look like a surfer?”
Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blond woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared
GIVE ME MITZI HARLAN’S JOB—I COULD DO IT LYING DOWN
. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.
“Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?”
“Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?”
She shrugged. “I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.”
“An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?”
She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. “Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?”
“Just what you see.”
“Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.”
The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the 250 mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.
“Sure. Seems very reasonable. You want to show me my ride?”
• • •
Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package—a blunt-nosed twenty-meter twin-turbine rig that deserved the name
hoverloader
more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sea-lanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armored skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.
“That get much use?” I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.
She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. “There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or”—an involuntary glance back toward the terminal building—“wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?”
“No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.” I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one. Dialed a local number.
“Southside Holdings,” said an androgynous synth voice. “Due to—”
I reeled off the fourteen-digit discrete coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.
“Kovacs, where the
fuck
have you been?”
I grinned despite myself. “Hey, Rad. Nice to talk to you, too.”
“It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?”
“It’s been
two
months, Radul.”
“It’s been more than two.”
“It’s been nine weeks—that’s my final offer.”
He laughed down the line, a sound that reminded me of a trawl winch cranking at speed. “Okay, Tak. So how was your trip? Catch any fish?”
“Yes, I did.” I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the cortical stacks. “Got some for you right here as promised. Canned for ease of carriage.”
“Of course. Hardly expect you to bring it fresh. Imagine the stink. Especially after three months.”
“Two months.”
The trawler winch again. “Nine weeks, I thought we agreed. So are you in town, finally?”
“Near enough, yeah.”
“You coming out to visit?”
“Yeah, see, that’s the problem. Something’s come up and I can’t. But I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fish—”
“No, nor would I. Your last consignment hasn’t kept well. Barely fit for consumption these days. My boys think I’m crazy still serving it up, but I told them. Takeshi Kovacs is old school. He pays his debts. We do what he asks, and when he surfaces
finally,
he will do what is right.”
I hesitated. Calibrated.
“I can’t get you your money right now, Rad. I daren’t go near a major credit transaction. Wouldn’t be good for you any more than for me. I’ll need time to sort it out. But you can have the fish, if you send someone to collect in the next hour.”
The silence crawled back onto the line. This was pushing the elastic of the debt to failure point, and we both knew it.
“Look, I got four. That’s one more than expected. You can have them now, all of them. You can serve them up without me, use them how you like, or not at all if my credit’s really out.”
He said nothing. His presence on the line was oppressive, like the wet heat coming off the Weed Expanse. Envoy sense told me this was the break, and Envoy sense is rarely wrong.
“The money’s coming, Rad. Hit me with a surcharge, if that’s what it takes. As soon as I’m done with this other shit, we’re back to business as usual. This is strictly temporary.”
Still nothing. The silence was beginning to sing, the tiny lethal song of a cable snagged and under stress. I stared out across the Expanse, as if I could find him and make eye contact.
“He would have gotten you,” I said bluntly. “You know that.”
The silence lasted a moment longer, then snapped across. Segesvar’s voice rang with false boisterousness.
“What you talking about, Tak?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Our meth-dealing friend, back in the day. You ran with the others, Rad, but the way your leg was, you wouldn’t have had a chance. If he’d come through me, he would have caught you up. You know that. The others ran, I stayed.”
On the other end of the line I heard him breathe out, like something uncoiling.
“So,” he said. “A surcharge. Shall we say thirty percent?”
“Sounds reasonable,” I lied, for both of us.
“Yes. But I think your previous fish will have to be taken off the menu now. Why don’t you come here to give your traditional valediction, and we’ll discuss the terms of this. Refinancing.”
“Can’t do that, Rad. I told you, I’m only passing through. An hour from now I’m gone again. Be a week or more before I can get back.”
“Then.” I could almost see him shrug. “You will miss the valediction. I would not have thought you would want that.”
“I don’t.” This was punishment, another surcharge on top of my volunteered thirty percent. Segesvar had me worked out; it’s a core skill in organized crime, and he was good at his trade. The Kossuth
haiduci
might not have the cachet and sophistication of the yakuza farther north, but it’s essentially the same game. If you’re going to make a living out of extortion, you’d better know how to get to people. And how to get to Takeshi Kovacs was painted all over my recent past like blood. It couldn’t have taken a lot of working out.
“Then come,” he said warmly. “We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake. Old times’
sake,
heheh? And a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.”