She sat staring into her glass as it filled. I shook my head.
“This isn’t you, Sylvie.”
“Yes it is.” Suddenly her tone was savage. “My friends are fucking dead or worse, Micky. I’ve got a whole planet of cops plus the Millsport yakuza looking to make me the same way. So don’t tell me this isn’t me. You don’t know what happens to me under those circumstances because you haven’t fucking seen it before, all right. Even I don’t fucking know what happens to me under those circumstances.”
“Yeah, and instead of finding out, you’re going to stay in here like some fucking Renouncer dream of a good little girl your parents once had. Going to sit in here playing with your plug-in world, and hope someone on the outside takes care of business for you.”
She said nothing, just raised the newly filled glass in my direction. I felt a sudden, constricting wave of shame pulse through me.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Would you like to live through what they did to Orr and the others? Because I’ve got it all on tap down here.”
“Sylvie, you can’t—”
“They died hard, Micky. Peeled back, all of them. At the end, Kiyoka was screaming like a baby for me to come and get her. You want to plug into that, carry that around with you for a while like I have to?”
I shivered, and it seemed to transmit itself to the whole construct. A small, cold thrum hung in the air around us.
“No.”
We sat for a long time in silence after that. Tokyo Crow’s clientele came and went around us, wraith-like.
After a while, she gestured vaguely upward.
“You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it?”
“If you let it be.”
“You called her a virus,” she said pensively. “As a virus, she was very successful in here. She infiltrated my systems as if she was designed for it. Maybe she’ll be as successful out there in the shadow play.”
I closed my eyes. Pressed a hand to my face.
“Something wrong, Micky?”
“Please tell me you’re being metaphorical now. I don’t think I can cope with another hardwired believer at the moment.”
“Hey, you don’t like the conversation, you can fuck off out of here, can’t you?”
The sudden edge on her voice kicked me back to New Hok and the seemingly endless deCom bickering. An unlooked-for smile tugged at my mouth with the memory. I opened my eyes and looked at her again. Placed both hands flat on the bar, sighed, and let the smile come up.
“I came to get you out, Sylvie.”
“I know.” She put her hand over one of mine. “But I’m fine here.”
“I told Las I’d look after you.”
“So look after her. That keeps me safe, too.”
I hesitated, trying to frame it right. “I think she might be some kind of weapon, Sylvie.”
“So? Aren’t we all?”
I looked around at the bar and its gray speed ghosts. The low murmur of amalgamated sound. “Is this really all you want?”
“Right now, Micky, it’s all I can cope with.”
My drink stood untouched on the bar in front of me. I stood up. Picked it up.
“Then I’d better be getting back.”
“Sure. I’ll see you out.”
The whiskey went down burning, cheap and rough, not what I’d been expecting.
• • •
She walked with me out onto the wharf. Here the dawn was already up, cold and pale gray, and there were no people, speeded pastiche or otherwise, anywhere in the unforgiving light. The sweeper station stood closed and deserted; the mooring points and the ocean beyond were both empty of traffic. There was a naked, stripped look to everything, and the Andrassy Sea came in and slapped at the pilings with sullen force. Looking north, you could sense Drava crouched below the horizon in similar, abandoned quiet.
We stood under the crane where we’d first met, and it hit me then with palpable force that this was the last time I’d see her.
“One question?”
She was staring out to sea. “Sure.”
“Your preferred active agent up there says she recognized someone in the holding constructs. Grigori Ishii. That chime with you at all?”
A slight frown. “It sounds familiar, yes. I couldn’t tell you from where, though. But I can’t see how a DH personality would have gotten down here.”
“Well, quite.”
“Did she say it
was
this Grigori?”
“No. She said there was something down here that sounded like him. But when you faked taking down the scorpion gun, afterward when you were coming out of it in Drava, you said it knew you, something
knew
you. Like an old friend.”
Sylvie shrugged. Most of her was still watching the northern horizon. “Then it could be something the mimints have evolved. A virus to trigger recognition routines in a human brain, makes you think you’re seeing or hearing something you already know. Each individual it hits would assign an appropriate fragment to fit.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely. It’s not like the mimints have had much human interaction to work off recently. Mecsek’s only been in place what, three years?”
“Four.” A faint smile. “Micky, the mimints were
designed
to kill humans. That’s what they were
for
originally, three hundred years ago. There’s no telling if some piece of viral weaponry built along those lines has survived this long, maybe even sharpened itself a bit.”
“Have you ever come across anything like that?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.”
“Or in here.”
“Or in here,” she agreed shortly. She wanted me gone.
“Or it could just be another personality-casing bomb.”
“It could be.”
“Yeah.” I looked around one more time. “Well. How do I get out of here?”
“The crane.” For a moment she came back to me. Her eyes switched in from the north and met mine. She nodded upward to where a steel ladder disappeared into the laced girderwork of the machine. “You just keep climbing up.”
Great.
“You take care of yourself, Sylvie.”
“I will.”
She kissed me briefly on the mouth. I nodded, clapped her on the shoulder, and backed away a couple of steps. Then I turned for the ladder, laid hands on the cold metal of the rungs, and started climbing.
It seemed solid enough. It beat ripwing-infested sea cliff and the underside of Martian architecture, anyway.
I was a couple of dozen meters into the girders when her voice floated up to join me.
“Hey, Micky.”
I peered downward. She was standing inside the crane’s base, staring up at me. Her hands were cupped around her mouth. I unfastened one hand carefully and waved.
“Yeah?”
“Just remembered. Grigori Ishii. We learned about him in school.”
“Learned what about him in school?”
She spread her arms.
“No idea, sorry. Who remembers shit like that?”
“Right.”
“Why don’t you ask
her
?”
Good question. Envoy caution seemed like the obvious answer. But stubborn mistrust came in a close second. A refusal. I wasn’t buying the glorious return of Quell at the cut rates Koi and the Bugs seemed prepared to accept.
“Maybe I will.”
“Well.” An arm lifted in farewell. “Scan up, Micky. Keep climbing, don’t look down.”
“Yeah,” I yelled it down. “You, too, Sylvie.”
I climbed. The sweeper station shrank to the proportions of a child’s toy. The sea took on the texture of hammered gray metal welded to a tilting horizon. Sylvie was a dot facing north, then too small to make out at all. Maybe she wasn’t there anymore. The girders around me lost any resemblance to the crane they had once been. The cold dawn light darkened to a flickery silver that danced in patterns on the metal that seemed maddeningly familiar. I didn’t seem to be tiring at all.
I stopped looking down.
CHAPTER FORTY
“So?” she asked finally.
I stared out of the window at Vchira Beach and the glitter of sunlight on the waves beyond. Both beach and water were beginning to fill up with tiny human figures intent on enjoying the weather. The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep were eminently environment-proofed, but you could almost feel the building heat, almost hear the rising chatter and squall of tourism that accompanied it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I came out of the construct.
“So you were right.” I spared a sideways glance for the woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s body, then went back to looking at the sea. The hangover was back in place, worse it seemed. “She’s not coming out. She’s fallen back on childhood Renouncer crabshit to cope with the grief, and she’s staying in there.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah.” I left the window alone, turned back to Tres and Vidaura. “We’re finished here.”
Nobody talked on the way back to the skimmer. We shouldered our way through brightly garbed crowds, working against the flow in silence. A lot of the time, our faces opened passage for us—you could see it in the expressions of people stepping hurriedly aside. But in the sunny warmth and enthusiasm to get to the water, not everyone was running even a surface level of attention. Sierra Tres scowled as her leg took clouts from garishly colored plastic beach implements, badly carried, but either drugs or focus kept her mouth clamped shut over any pain she suffered. No one wanted to create a memorable scene. Only once she turned to look at a particularly clumsy offender, and he practically ran away.
Hey guys.
The thought ran sourly through me.
Don’t you recognize your political heroes when you see them? We’re coming to liberate you all.
At Sunshine Fun Jetties, the pilot was lying on the sloping flank of the skimmer, soaking up the sun like everybody else. He sat up blinking as we came aboard.
“That was quick. You want to get back already?”
Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.
“You see any reason to hang about?”
“Hey, it’s not so bad. I get down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time. ’S a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.”
I looked up, surprised. “Yeah.”
“Someone asking after you.”
I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation. The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.
“What did they want?”
“Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.”
I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.
“So what’d you tell him?”
“Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed rack with livewire soon as look at them.”
“This guy young or old?”
“Oh, young. Carried himself, too, know what I mean?”
Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind.
Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.
Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.
Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.
“Tak—”
“You go back with the others now,” I said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Tak, we need you to—”
I smiled at her. “Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything anymore. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do anymore.”
She looked steadily back at me.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Rip out his throat and be right back.”
She shook her head.
“Is this really all you want?”
The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.
“What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah, right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia,
you’ve
done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.”
“So what instead? This? More pointless slaughter?”
I shrugged. “Pointless slaughter is what I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. You
made
me good at it, Virginia.”
That took her like a slap across the face. She flinched. Sierra Tres and the pilot looked on, curious. The woman who called herself Quell, I noticed, had gone below to the cabin.
“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”
I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”
“But it doesn’t
solve
anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah
back.
When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”
“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.
“I don’t fucking care. You answer me.
Does it make you feel any better?
”
Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.
“Only when I’m killing them.”
She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”
“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”
She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.
She turned away without a word.
• • •
The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water, and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face. I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.
Sanctified solo assassins.
I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death, and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover, either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.
The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark. They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.
So far.
I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins; you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to. You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matte, low-profile pirate skimmers amid the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot, and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.
Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly kept façades, and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris-strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon. A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.
I found him well before evening.
It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defenses of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board-hire place called the Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.
“Sure, he checked in about a week back,” the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. “I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, got a real balance about him, too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.” She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound. “Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?”
“Surfers everywhere,” I agreed.
“So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?”
“Well.” I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. “It’s actually something I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.”
That appealed to her. She grinned and got up. “Sure, we can do that.”
She left the boards and came around to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia, and fished it out.
“There you go.”
She took the little black device curiously. “That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?”
“No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amid the dust on ledge 74.
“Actually,” I said with feigned abruptness. “Can I get a room?”
She turned back, surprised. “Well, uh, sure . . .”
“Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.”
“Sure, no problem.” She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinized it for a moment, and then gave me the grin again. “If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.”
“That’s very kind,” I said. “Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.”
Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.
“So you don’t want me to give him this?”
“Not anymore, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.”
• • •
Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive-supplier warehouses.
The room beyond was cramped and basic. A capsule bathroom, a disposable mesh hammock to save on space and laundry, storage drawers molded into the walls, and a small plastic table and chair. A variable-transparency window wired clumsily to the room’s climate control system—the priest had left it dimmed. I cast about for somewhere to hide myself in the gloom and was driven into the capsule for lack of alternatives. Sting of recent antibac spray in my nose as I stepped in—the clean cycle must have run not long ago. I shrugged, breathed through my mouth, and searched the cabinets for painkillers to flatten the rolling wave of my hangover. In one, I found a foil of basic heatstroke pills for tourists. I dry-swallowed a couple and seated myself on the closed toilet unit to wait.
There’s something wrong here,
the Envoy sense admonished me.
Something doesn’t fit.
Maybe he’s not what you think.
Yeah, right—he’s a negotiator, come to talk you down. God’s changed his mind.
Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch.
These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.
Sarah seared across my mind. Momentarily, the world tilted around me with the depth of my fury. For the thousandth time I imagined the scene again, and there was a roaring in my ears like a distant crowd.
I drew the Tebbit knife and looked down at the dull, dark blade.
Slowly, with the sight, Envoy calm soaked back through me. I settled again in the small space of the capsule, letting it drench me to a chilled purpose. Fragments of Virginia Vidaura’s voice came with it.