Out of nowhere, Lazlo’s face.
I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her.
I glanced across to where Suzi Petkovski was lowering the canopy back over the turbine.
“Sorry, Rad. This is too important to juggle. You want your fish, send someone out to the inland harbor. Charter terminal, ramp seven. I’ll be here for an hour.”
“No valediction?”
I grimaced. “No valediction. I don’t have the time.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I think,” he said finally, “that I would like very much to look in your eyes right now, Takeshi Kovacs. Perhaps I will come myself.”
“Sure. Be good to see you. Just make it inside the hour.”
He hung up. I gritted my teeth and smashed a fist against the crate beside me.
“Fuck.
Fuck.
”
You look after her, right. You keep her safe.
Yeah, yeah. All right.
I’m trusting you, Micky.
All right, I fucking hear you.
The chime of a phone.
For a moment, I held the one I was using stupidly to my ear. Then it hit me that the sound came from the opened pack beside me. I leaned over and pushed aside three or four phones before I found the one with the lit display. It was one I’d used before, one with a broken seal.
“Yeah?”
Nothing. The line was open but there was no sound on it. Not even static. Perfect black silence yawned into my ear.
“Hello?”
And something whispered up out of the dark, just barely more audible than the tension I’d felt in the previous call.
hurry
And then there was only the silence again.
I lowered the phone and stared at it.
I’d made three calls in Tekitomura, used three phones from the pack. I’d called Lazlo, I’d called Yaroslav, I’d called Isa. It could have been any of the three who had just rung. To know for sure, I’d need to check the log to see whom the phone had connected with before.
But I didn’t need to.
A whisper out of dark silence. A voice over distance you couldn’t measure.
hurry
I knew which phone it was.
And I knew who was calling me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Segesvar was as good as his word. Forty minutes after he hung up, a garish red-and-black open-top sports skimmer came howling off the Expanse and into the harbor at illegal speed. Every head on the wharf turned to watch it arrive. It was the kind of boatcraft that on the seaward side of Newpest would have occasioned an instant Port Authority override ’cast and an ignominious stall in the water there and then. I don’t know whether the inland harbor was ill equipped, if Segesvar had expensive counterjamming software installed in his rich-kid toy, or if the Weed Expanse gangs just had the Inland PA in their pocket. In any event, the Expansemobile didn’t stall out. Instead it banked about, raising spray, and made a fast line for the gap between ramps six and seven. A dozen meters out, it cut its motors and swept in on momentum. Behind the wheel, Segesvar spotted me. I nodded and raised one hand. He waved back.
I sighed.
This stuff trails out behind us across the decades, but it isn’t like the spray Radul Segesvar’s arrival was cutting from the water in the harbor. It doesn’t fall tracelessly back. It just hangs there instead, like the raised dust you get in the wake of a Sharyan desert cruiser, and if you turn about and head back into your own past, you find yourself coughing on it.
“Hey,
Kovacs.
”
It was a shout, maliciously loud and cheerful. Segesvar was standing up in the cockpit, still steering. Broad, gull-wing-frame sunshades covered his eyes in conscious rejection of the Millsport fashion for ultra-engineered finger-width lenses. A paper-thin, hand-sanded iridescent swamp-panther-skin jacket draped his frame. He waved again and grinned. From the bow of the vessel a grapple line fired with a metallic bang. It was harpoon-headed, unrelated to any of the sockets along the ramp edge, and it chewed a hole in the evercrete facing of the wharf half a meter below the point where I stood. The skimmer cranked itself in and Segesvar leapt out of the cockpit to stand on the bow, looking up at me.
“You want to bellow my name a couple more times?” I asked him evenly. “In case someone didn’t get it first time around.”
“Oops.” He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. “Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?”
“Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?”
“I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?”
I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The
haiduci
straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in, and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own—pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry. It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties. Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d resleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most
haiduci
—and like me—he’d had his share of time in storage.
“Nice sleeve,” he said, pacing a circle around me. “Very nice. What happened to the other one?”
“Long story.”
“Which you’re not going to tell me.” He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. “Right?”
“Right.”
He sighed theatrically. “This is disappointing, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as closemouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.”
I shrugged. “I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.”
“Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.”
He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one who got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.
“There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?”
“If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.”
“Some other time.”
“Yeah, you’re always so fucking driven, aren’t you? If it’s not the Envoys or the neoQuells, it’s some fucking private revenge scheme. You know, Tak, it isn’t really my business, but someone needs to tell you this and looks like I get the job. You need to stop and smell the weed, man. Remember that you’re living.” He put his sunlenses back on and jerked his head toward the terminal. “All right, come on then. Machine coffee, why not. It’ll be a novelty.”
Back in the cool, we sat at a table near glass panels that gave a view out onto the harbor. Half a dozen other spectators sat in the same area with their associated baggage, waiting. A wasted-looking man in rags was doing the rounds among them, holding out a tray for credit chips and a hard-luck story for anyone who was interested. Most weren’t. There was a faint odor of cheap antibacterial in the air that I hadn’t noticed before. The cleaning robots must have been by.
The coffee was grim.
“See,” said Segesvar, setting his aside with an exaggerated scowl. “I should have your legs broken just for making me drink that.”
“You could try.”
For a moment, our eyes locked. He shrugged.
“It was a joke, Tak. You’re losing your sense of humor.”
“Yeah, I’m putting a thirty percent surcharge on it.” I sipped at my own coffee, expressionless. “Used to be my friends could get it for nothing, but times change.”
He let that lie for a moment, then cocked his head and looked me in the eye again.
“You think I’m treating you unfairly?”
“I think you’re conveniently forgetful of the real meaning behind the words
you saved my ass back there, man.
”
Segesvar nodded as if he’d expected no less. He looked down at the table between us.
“That is an old debt,” he said quietly. “And a questionable one.”
“You didn’t think so at the time.”
It was too far back to summon easily to mind. Back before the Envoy conditioning went in, back where things get blurred with the passing decades. Most of all, I remembered the stink in the alley. Alkaline precipitates from the belaweed-processing plant and dumped oil from the hydraulic systems on the compression tanks. The meth dealer’s curses and the glint of the long bottleback gaff as he slashed it through the damp air toward me. The others were gone, their youthful thug enthusiasm for the robbery evaporating in swift terror as that honed steel hook came out and ripped open Radul Segesvar’s leg from kneecap to thigh. Gone yelling and sprinting away into the night like exorcised sprites, leaving Radul dragging himself one yelping meter at a time along the alley after them, leaving me, sixteen years old, facing the steel with empty hands.
Come ’ere, you little fuck.
The dealer was grinning at me in the gloom, almost crooning as he advanced, blocking my escape.
Try to tumble me on my own patch, will you. I’m going to open you up and feed you your own fucking guts, my lad.
And for the first time in my life, I realized with a sensation like cold hands on my young neck that I was looking at a man who was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him.
Not batter me like my father, not cut me up like one of the inept gang thugs we squabbled with daily on the streets of Newpest. Kill me. Kill me, and then probably rip out my stack and toss it into the scummed-up waters of the harbor where it would stay for longer than the life of anyone I knew or cared about. It was that image, that terror of being sunk and lost in poisoned water, that drove me forward, made me count the swing of the sharpened steel and hit him as he came off balance on the end of the downstroke.
Then we both went over in the muck and debris and ammoniac stink of the processing plant’s leavings, and I fought him there for the gaff.
Took it from him.
Lashed out and, more by luck than judgment, ripped open his belly with it.
The fight went out of him like water down a sink. He made a loud gurgling, eyes wide and glued to mine. I stared back, rage and fear still punching through the veins in my temples, every chemical switch in my body thrown. I was barely aware of what I’d just done. Then he sank backward away from me and into the pile of muck. He sat down there as if it were an armchair he liked. I struggled off my knees, dripping alkaline slime from face and hair, still caught in his gaze, still gripping the handle of the gaff. His mouth made flapping motions, his throat gave up wet, desperate sounds. I looked down and I saw his innards still looped over the hook in my hand.
Shock caught me up. My hand spasmed open involuntarily and the hook fell out of it. I staggered away, spraying vomit. The weak, pleading sounds he made damped out beneath the hoarse rasp in my throat as my stomach emptied itself. The hot, urgent reek of fresh sick joined the general stench in the alley. I convulsed with the force of my heaving, and fell over in the mess.
I think he was still alive when I got back to my feet and went to help Segesvar. The sounds he was making followed me all the way out of the alley, and news reports the next day said he’d finally bled to death sometime close to dawn. Then again, the same sounds followed me around for weeks afterward, whenever I went anywhere quiet enough to hear myself think. For the best part of the next year, I woke up with them clotted in my ears as often as not.
I looked away from it. The glass panels of the terminal slid back into focus. Across the table, Segesvar was watching me intently. Maybe he was remembering, too. He grimaced.
“So you don’t think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappear for nine weeks without a word, leave me holding your shit and looking like a fool in front of the other
haiduci.
Now you want to reschedule the finance? You know what I’d do to anyone else who pulled this shit?”
I nodded. Recalled with wry humor my own fury at Plex a couple of months back as I stood seeping synthetic body fluids in Tekitomura.
We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak.
I’d wanted to kill him, just for saying it like that.
“You think thirty percent is unjust?”
I sighed.
“Rad, you’re a gangster and I’m.” I gestured. “No better. I don’t think either of us knows much about what’s just and unjust. You do what you like. I’ll find you the money.”
“All right.” He was still staring at me. “Twenty percent. That fit your sense of commercial propriety?”
I shook my head, said nothing. I dug in my pocket for the cortical stacks, kept my fist closed as I leaned across with them. “Here. This is what you came for. Four fish. Do what you want with them.”
He pushed my arm aside and jabbed an angry finger in my face.
“No, my friend. I do what
you
want with them. This is a service I’m providing you, and don’t you fucking forget that. Now, I said twenty percent. Is that fair?”
The decision crystallized out of nowhere, so fast it was like a slap across the back of the head. Picking it apart later, I couldn’t decide what triggered it, only that it felt like listening again to that tiny voice out of the darkness, telling me to hurry. It felt like a sudden prickle of sweat across my palms and the terror that I was going to be too late for something that mattered.
“I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your
haiduci
pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.”
He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from
haiduci
experia flicks like
Friends of Ireni Cozma
and
Outlaw Voices.
It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.
“All right,
fuck
it.
Fifteen
percent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen percent, right?”
I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. “All right, fifteen percent. Do you still want these?”
He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight of hand, and pocketed them.
“You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,” he growled. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“That’s a compliment, right?”
He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.
“DeCom vet,” he mumbled. “Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—”
“No, I haven’t got any money,” said Segesvar impatiently. “Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.”
He caught my glance.
“What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?”
• • •
Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small-scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied gray turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.
To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.