Very slowly, it grew on me that the Envoy conditioning hadn’t yet come online against my vertigo. With the rock face less than half a meter in front of my face and the Eishundo muscle system thrumming on my bones, it was almost possible to forget that there was a drop below. The rock lost the coating of spray from the maelstrom as we climbed higher, the repeating roar of waves faded to distant white noise. The gecko grip on my hands made glassy, treacherous holds laughably comfortable. And more than all these factors, or maybe the culminating Eishundo touch, what I’d told Natsume seemed to be true—the sleeve knew how to do this.
Then, as I reached a set of holds and ledges whose markers the mask display labeled with a rest-point symbol, I looked down to see how Brasil and Tres were doing, and ruined it all.
Sixty meters below—not even a third of the whole climb—the sea was a blackened fleece, touched with Daikoku silver where it rippled. The skirt of rocks at the base of Rila sat in the water like solid shadows. The two big ones that framed the channel where we’d come in now looked as if they’d fit into my hand. The back-and-forth sluice of water between them was hypnotic, pulling me downward. The view seemed to pivot dizzyingly.
The conditioning came online, flattening the fear. Like air lock doors in my head. My gaze came up again to face the rock. Sierra Tres reached up and tapped my foot.
“Okay?”
I realized I’d been frozen for the best part of a minute.
“Just resting.”
The marked trail of holds leaned left, an upward diagonal around a broad buttress that Natsume had warned us was pretty much unclimbable. Instead he’d lain back and moved almost upside down under the chin of the buttress, feet jammed against minute folds and fissures in the stone, fingers pinching angles of rock that barely deserved the name
hold,
until he could finally get both hands on a series of sloped ledges at the far side and haul himself back into a nearly vertical position.
I gritted my teeth and started to do the same.
Halfway there, my foot slipped, swung my weight out, and pulled my right hand off the rock. An involuntary grunt, and I was dangling left-handed, feet flailing for purchase far too low to find anything apart from empty air. I would have screamed but the barely recovering sinews in my left arm were doing it for me.
“Fuck.”
Hang on tight.
The gecko grip held.
I curled upward from the waist, craning my neck to see the marked footholds in the glass of the mask. Short, panicky breaths. I got one foot lodged against a bubble of stone. Tiny increments of strain came off my left arm. Unable to see clearly with the mask, I reached up in the dark with my right hand and felt about on the rock for another hold.
Found it.
Moved my braced foot fractionally and jammed the other one in next to it.
Hung, panting.
No, don’t fucking
stop
!
It took all my willpower to move my right hand for the next hold. Two more moves, and it took the same sickening effort to look for the next. Three more moves, a fractionally improved angle, and I realized I was almost to the other side of the buttress. I reached up, found the first of the sloping ledges, and dragged myself hyperventilating and cursing upright. A genuine, deeply grooved hold offered itself. I got my feet to the lowest ledge. Sagged with relief against the cool stone.
Get yourself up out of the fucking way, Tak. Don’t leave them hanging about down there.
I scrambled up the next set of holds until I was on top of the buttress. A broad shelf glowed red in the mask display, smiling face floating above it. Rest point. I waited there while Sierra Tres and then Brasil emerged from below and joined me. The big surfer was grinning like a kid.
“Had me worried there, Tak.”
“Just. Don’t. Fucking don’t, all right?”
We rested for about ten minutes. Over our heads, the battlement flange of the citadel was now clearly visible, clean-cut edges emerging from the chaotic angles of the natural rock it jutted above. Brasil nodded upward.
“Not far to go now, eh?”
“Yeah, and only the ripwings to worry about.” I dug out the repellent spray and squirted myself liberally with it all over. Tres and Brasil followed suit. It had a thin, faintly green odor that seemed stronger in the fitful darkness. It might not drive a ripwing away under all and any circumstances, but it would certainly put them off. And if that wasn’t enough . . .
I drew the Rapsodia from its holster on my lower ribs and pressed it to a utility patch on my chest. It clung there, easily at hand in fractions of a second, always assuming I could spare the hand to grab it in the first place. Faced with the prospect of meeting a cliff full of angry, startled ripwings with young to defend, I would have preferred the heavy-duty Sunjet blaster on my back, but there was no way I could wield it effectively. I grimaced, adjusted the mask, and checked the datajack again. Drew a deep breath and reached for the next set of handholds.
Now the cliff face grew convex, bulging out and forcing us to climb at a sustained backward lean of twenty degrees. The path Natsume had taken wove back and forth across the rock, governed by the sparse availability of decent holds, and even then opportunities to rest were few and far between. By the time the bulge faded back to a vertical, my arms were aching from shoulder to fingertip, and my throat was raw from panting.
Hang on tight.
I found a display-marked diagonal crack, moved up it to give the others space, and jammed an arm in up to the elbow. Then I hung there limply, collecting breath.
The smell hit me about the same time as I saw the gossamer-thin streamers of white dangling from above.
Oily, acidic.
Here we go.
I twisted my head and stared upward for confirmation. We were directly below the colony’s nesting band. The whole expanse of rock was thickly plastered with the creamy webbing secretion that ripwing embryos were birthed directly into and lived in for their four-month gestation. Evidently, somewhere just above me, mature hatchlings had torn their way free and either taken wing or tumbled incompetently to a Darwinian conclusion in the sea below.
Let’s not think about that right now, eh?
I cranked the neurachem vision and scanned the colony. Dark shapes preened and flapped here and there on protruding crags in the mass of white, but there weren’t many of them.
Ripwings,
Natsume assured us,
don’t spend a lot of time at the nests. No eggs to keep warm, and the embryos feed directly off the webbing.
Like most hardcore climbers, he was a part-time expert on the creatures.
You’re going to get a few sentinels, the odd birthing female and maybe some well-fed parents secreting more gunge onto their particular patch. If you go carefully, they may leave you alone.
I grimaced again and began to work my way up the crack. The oily stink intensified, and shreds of torn webbing began to adhere to my suit. The chameleochrome system blanched to match wherever the stuff touched. I stopped breathing through my nose. A quick glance down past my boots showed me the others following, faces contorted with the smell.
And then, inevitably, the crack ran out and the display said that the next set of holds was buried beneath the webbing. I nodded drearily to myself and plunged a hand into the mess, wriggling fingers around until they found a spur of rock that resembled the red model in the display. It seemed pretty solid. A second plunge into the webbing gave me another, even better hold and I hacked sideways with one foot, looking for a ledge that was also covered in the stuff. Now, even breathing through my mouth, I could taste the oil at the back of my throat.
This was far worse than the climb over the bulge. The holds were good, but each time you had to force your hand or foot through the thick, clinging webs until it was secure. You had to watch out for the vague shadows of embryos hung up inside the stuff, because even embryonic they could bite, and the surge of fear hormones they’d release through the webbing if you touched them would hit the air like a chemical siren. The sentinels would be on us seconds after, and I didn’t rate our chances of fighting them off without falling.
Stick your hand in. Flex it about.
Get a grip. Move.
Pull clear and shake your hand free. Gag at the liberated stink. Stick your hand back in.
By now we were coated with clinging strands of the stuff and I was finding it hard to remember what climbing on clean rock had been like. At the edges of a nearly cleared patch, I passed a dead and rotting hatchling, caught upside down by the talons in a freak knot of webbing it hadn’t been strong enough to break before it starved to death. It added new, sickly-sweet layers of decay to the stink. Higher up, a nearly grown embryo seemed to turn its beaked head to look at me as I reached gingerly into the gunge half a meter away.
I drew myself up over a ledge made rounded and sticky by webbing.
The ripwing lunged at me.
Probably, it was as startled as I was. Rising mist of repellent and the bulky black figure that came after, you could see how it would be. It went for my eyes with a repeated stabbing movement, punched the mask instead and jerked my head back. The beak made a skittering noise on the glass. I lost my left-hand grip, pivoted on the right. The ripwing croaked and hunched closer, stabbing at my throat. I felt the serrated edge of the beak gouge skin. Out of options, I dragged myself back hard against the ledge with my right hand. My left whiplashed out, neurachem-swift, and grabbed the fucking thing by the neck. I ripped it off the ledge and hurled it downward. There was another startled croak, then an explosion of leathery wings below me. Sierra Tres yelled.
I got another grip with my left hand and peered down. They were both still there. The ripwing was a retreating winged shadow, soaring away out to sea. I unlocked my breath again.
“You okay?”
“Can you please not do that again,” gritted Brasil.
I didn’t have to. Natsume’s route took us through an area of torn and used-up webbing next, finally over a narrow band of thicker secretion, and then we were clear. A dozen good holds after that and we were crouched on a worked-stone platform under the main battlement flange of the Rila citadel.
Tight, traded grins. There was enough space on the platform to sit down. I tapped the induction mike.
“Isa?”
“Yes, I’m here.” Her voice came through uncharacteristically high-pitched, hurried with tension. I grinned again.
“We’re at the top. Better let the others know.”
“All right.”
I settled back against the stonework and breathed out loose-lipped. Stared out at the horizon.
“I do
not
want to have to do that again.”
“Still this bit left,” said Tres, jerking her thumb upward at the flange. I followed the motion and looked at the underside of the battlement.
Settlement-years architecture.
Natsume had been almost scornful.
So fucking baroque, they might as well have built a ladder into it.
And the glimmer of pride that all his time as a Renouncer didn’t seem to have taken away.
’Course, they never expected anyone to get up there in the first place.
I examined the ranks of carving on the upward-sloping underside of the flange. Mostly, it was the standard wing-and-wave motifs, but in places there were stylized faces representing Konrad Harlan and some of his more notable relatives from the Settlement era. Every ten square centimeters of stonework offered a decent hold. The distance out to the edge of the flange was less than three meters. I sighed and got back to my feet.
“Okay then.”
Brasil braced himself next to me, peering up the angle of the stone. “Looks easy enough, eh? Think there are any sensors?”
I pressed the Rapsodia against my chest to make sure it was still secure. Loosened the blaster in its sheath on my back. Got back to my feet.
“Who fucking cares.”
I reached up, stuck a fist in Konrad Harlan’s eye, and dug in with my fingers. Then I climbed out over the drop before I could think about it. About thirty hanging seconds and I was onto the vertical wall. I found similar carvings to work with and seconds later was crouched on a three-meter-broad parapet, peering down into a cloister-lined, tear-shaped ornamental space of raked gravel and painstakingly aligned rocks. A small statue of Harlan stood near the center, head bowed and hands folded meditatively, overshadowed at the rear by an idealized Martian whose wings were spread in protection and conferral of power. At the far end of the rounded space, a regal arch led away, I knew, to the shadowed courtyards and gardens of the citadel’s guest wing.
The perfume of herbs and ledgefruit blew past me, but there was no local noise beyond the breeze itself. The guests, it appeared, were all across in the central complex, where lights blazed and the sounds of celebration came and went with the wind. I strained the neurachem and picked out cheers, elegant music that Isa would have hated, a voice raised in song that was quite beautiful.
I pulled the Sunjet from its sheath on my back and clicked the power on. Waiting there in the darkness on the edge of the party, hands full of death, I felt momentarily like some evil spirit out of legend. Brasil and Tres came up behind me and fanned out on the parapet. The big surfer had a heavy antique frag rifle cradled in his arms; Tres hefted her blaster left-handed to make room for the Kalashnikov solid-load in her right. There was a distant look on her face and she seemed to be weighing the two weapons for balance, or as if she might throw them. The night sky split with angelfire and lit us, bluish and unreal. Thunder rumbled like an incitement. Under it all, the maelstrom called.
“All right then,” I said softly.
“Yes, that’s probably far enough,” said a woman’s voice from the garden-perfumed shadows. “Put down your weapons, please.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Figures, armed and armored, stepped out of the cloistering. At least a dozen of them. Here and there I could see a pale face, but most wore bulky enhanced-vision masks and tactical-marine-style helmets. Combat armor hugged their chests and limbs like extra muscle. The weaponry was equally heavy-duty. Shard blasters with gape-mouthed dispersal fittings, frag rifles about a century newer than the one Jack Soul Brasil had brought to the party. A couple of hip-mounted plasmaguns. No one up in the Harlan eyrie was taking any chances.
I lowered the barrel of the Sunjet gently to point at the stone parapet. Kept a loose grip on the butt. Peripheral vision told me Brasil had done the same with the frag rifle, and that Sierra Tres had her arms at her sides.
“Yes, I really meant
relinquish
your weapons,” said the same woman urbanely. “As in put them down altogether. Perhaps my Amanglic is not as idiomatic as it could be.”
I turned in the direction the voice came from.
“That you, Aiura?”
There was a long pause, and then she stepped out of the archway at the end of the ornamental space. Another orbital discharge lit her for a moment, then the gloom sank back and I had to use neurachem to keep the detail. The Harlan security executive was the epitome of First Family beauty—elegant, almost ageless Eurasian features, jet-black hair sculpted back in a static field that seemed to both crown and frame the pale of her face. A mobile intelligence of lips and gaze, the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes to denote a life lived. A tall, slim frame wrapped in a simple quilted jacket in black and dark red with the high collar of office, matching slacks loose enough to appear a full-length court gown when she stood still. Flat-heeled shoes that she could run or fight in if she had to.
A shard pistol. Not aimed, not quite lowered.
She smiled in the dim light.
“I am Aiura, yes.”
“Got my fuckhead younger self there with you?”
Another smile. A flicker of eyebrows as she glanced sideways, back the way she’d come. He stepped out of the shadowed archway. There was a grin on his face, but it didn’t look very firmly anchored.
“Here I am, old man. Got something to say to me?”
I eyed the tanned combat frame, the gathered stance, and the bound-back hair. Like some fucking bad guy from a cut-rate samurai flick.
“Nothing you’d listen to,” I told him. “I’m just trying to sort out the idiot count here.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not the one who just climbed two hundred meters so he could walk into an ambush.”
I ignored the jibe and looked back at Aiura, who was watching me with amused curiosity.
“I’m here for Sylvie Oshima,” I said quietly.
My younger self coughed laughter. Some of the armored men and women took it up, but it didn’t last. They were too nervous; there were still too many guns in play. Aiura waited for the last guffaws to skitter out.
“I think we’re all aware of that, Kovacs-san. But I fail to see how you’re going to accomplish your goal.”
“Well, I’d like you to go and fetch her for me.”
More grating laughter. But the security exec’s smile had paled out, and she gestured sharply for quiet.
“Be serious, Kovacs-san. I don’t have unlimited patience.”
“Believe me, neither do I. And I’m tired. So you’d better send a couple of your men down to get Sylvie Oshima from whatever interrogation chamber you’re holding her in, and you’d better hope she’s not been harmed in any way, because if she has, this negotiation is over.”
Now it had grown quiet again in the stone garden. There was no more laughter. Envoy conviction, the tone in my voice, the choice of words, the ease in my stance—these things told them to believe.
“With what exactly are you negotiating, Kovacs-san?”
“With the head of Mitzi Harlan,” I said simply.
The quiet cranked tight. Aiura’s face might have been graven from stone for all the reaction it showed. But something in the way she stood changed and I knew I had her.
“Aiura-san, I am not bluffing. Konrad Harlan’s favorite granddaughter was taken by a Quellist assault team in Danchi two minutes ago. Her secret-service detachment is dead, as is anyone else who mistakenly tried to come to her aid. You have been focused in the wrong place. And you now have less than thirty minutes to render me Sylvie Oshima unharmed—after that, I have no influence over the outcomes. Kill us, take us prisoner. It won’t matter. None of it will make any difference. Mitzi Harlan will die in great pain.”
The moment pivoted. Up on the parapet it was cool and quiet, and I could hear the maelstrom faintly. It was a solid, carefully engineered plan, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t get me killed. I wondered briefly what would happen if someone shot me off the edge. If I’d be dead before I hit.
“Crabshit!” It was me. He’d stepped toward the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. “You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—”
I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathized—the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.
“Wouldn’t I?” I gestured. “You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there—they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.”
Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.
“You’ll forgive me,” she said politely, “if I don’t take this on trust.”
I nodded. “Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.”
It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed. She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.
“How do you plan to leave?” she asked me.
“Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain half a dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.”
“Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,” drawled Kovacs. “Not a good time to be flying tonight.”
I stared back at him with dislike. “I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”
“And Mitzi Harlan?” The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. “What assurances do I have of her safety?”
Brasil stirred at my side for the first time since the confrontation began.
“We are not murderers.”
“No?” Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. “Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.”
For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. “Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—”
“I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,” I said loudly. “Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.”
Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.
I saw the decision take root in her.
“Very well,” she said briskly. “You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.”
I smeared her a brief smile. “Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now, where’s my fucking helicopter?”
• • •
They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death-white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish color across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.
I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.
“Is that her?” asked Tres tautly.
I lifted my free hand. “Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?”
“I would advise against overreaction.” But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were. “The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried, and she responded badly.”
My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.
“Have you fed her?” I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.
“Intravenously.” Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. “You must understand that—”
“We understand perfectly,” said Brasil. “We understand what you and your kind are. And someday soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.”
He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle. Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.
“
No!
Stand
down.
All of you.”
I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, “You, too, Jack. Don’t blow this.”
A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced toward us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.
I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot; then she looked back at me and gestured an
okay.
I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.
“Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her.
Everybody else stays back.
”
It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted around to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the gray-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.
And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoop-copter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer.
“You what?”
She leaned closer again. Spoke directly and sibilantly into my ear.
“I said, you send her back to me whole, Kovacs. These joke revolutionaries, that’s a fight we can have another time. But they harm any part of Mitzi Harlan’s mind or body and I’ll spend the rest of my existence hunting you down.”
I grinned back at her in the noise. I raised my voice as she drew back.
“You don’t frighten me, Aiura. I’ve been dealing with scum like you all my life. You’ll get Mitzi back because I said you would. But if you really care that much about her, you’d better start planning some lengthy holidays for her offworld. These guys aren’t fucking about.”
She looked down at Sylvie Oshima.
“It isn’t her, you know,” she shouted. “There’s no way for it to be her. Quellcrist Falconer is dead. Really Dead.”
I nodded. “Okay. So if that’s the case, how come she’s got all you First Family fucks so bent out of shape?”
The security exec’s shout became genuinely agitated. “Why? Because, Kovacs, whoever this is—and it’s
not
Quell—
whoever
this is, she’s brought back a plague from the Uncleared. A whole new form of death. You ask her about the Qualgrist Protocol when she wakes up, and then ask yourself if what I’ve done here to stop her is so terrible.”
“Hoy!” It was my younger self, elbows crooked under Sylvie’s knees, hands spread expressively wide beneath. “Are we going to load this bitch, or are you going to stand there talking about it all night?”
I held his gaze for a long moment, then lifted Sylvie’s head and shoulders carefully up to where Sierra Tres waited in the swoopcopter’s cramped cabin. The other Kovacs shoved hard, and the rest of her body slid in after. The move brought him up close beside me.