CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Jad had a small, battered skimmer she’d hired in Kem Point. It was parked under harsh security lighting on a rental ramp at the back of the hostel. We went out to it, collecting a cheery wave from the girl on reception, who seemed to have derived a touching delight from her role in our successful reunion. Jad coded the locks on the sliding roof, clambered behind the wheel, and spun us rapidly out into the dark of the Expanse. As the glimmer of lights from the Strip shrank behind us, she tore off the beard again and gave me the wheel while she stripped off her robes.
“Yeah, why wrap yourself up like that?” I asked her. “What was the point?”
She shrugged. “Cover. I figured I had the yak looking for me at least, and I still didn’t know what your end was, who you were playing for. Best to stay cloaked. Everywhere you go, people tend to leave the Beards alone.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, even the cops.” She lifted the ocher surplice over her head. “Funny stuff, religion. No one wants to talk to a priest.”
“Especially one who might declare you an enemy of God for the way you cut your hair.”
“Well, yeah, that too I guess. Anyway, I got some novelty shop in Kem Point to make up the stuff, told them it was for a beach party. And you know what, it works. No one talks to me. Plus.” She freed herself from the rest of the robes with accustomed ease and jabbed a thumb at the mimint-killer shard gun strapped under her arm. “Makes great cover for the hardware.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“You lugged that fucking cannon all the way down here? What were you planning to do, splatter me across the Expanse with it?”
She gave me a sober look. Under the straps of the holster, her deCom T-shirt was printed with the words
CAUTION: SMART MEAT WEAPON SYSTEM
.
“Maybe,” she said, and turned away to stow her disguise at the back of the tiny cabin.
• • •
Navigating the Expanse at night isn’t much fun when you’re driving a rental with the radar capacity of a child’s toy. Both Jad and I were Newpest natives, and we’d seen enough skimmer wrecks growing up to throttle back and take it slow. It didn’t help that Hotei was still down and mounting cloud shrouded Daikoku at the horizon. There was a commercial traffic lane for the tourist buses, illuminum marker buoys marching off into the weed-fragrant night, but it wasn’t much help. Segesvar’s place was a long way off the standard routes. Within half an hour the buoys had faded out of sight and we were alone with the scant coppery light of a high-flung, speeding Marikanon.
“Peaceful out here,” Jad said, as if making the discovery for the first time.
I grunted and wheeled us left as the skimmer’s lights picked out a sprawl of tepes root ahead. The outermost branches scraped loudly on the metal of the skirt as we passed. Jad winced.
“Maybe we should have waited for morning.”
I shrugged. “Go back if you like.”
“No, I think—”
The radar blipped.
We both looked at the console, then at each other. The reported presence blipped again, louder.
“Maybe a bale freighter,” I said.
“Maybe.” But there was a hardened deCom dislike in her face as she watched the signal build.
I killed the forward drives and waited as the skimmer coasted to a gentle halt on the murmur of lift stabilizers. The scent of weed pressed inward. I stood up and leaned on the edge of the opened roof panels. Faintly, along with the smells of the Expanse, the breeze carried the sound of motors approaching.
I dropped back into the body of the cockpit.
“Jad, I think you’d better take the artillery and get up near the tail. Just in case.”
She nodded curtly and gestured for me to give her some space. I backed up and she swung herself effortlessly up onto the roof, then freed the shard blaster from its webbing holster. She glanced down at me.
“Fire control?”
I thought for a moment, then pumped the stabilizers. The murmuring of the lift system rose to a sustained growl, then sank back.
“Like that. You hear that, you shoot up everything in sight.”
“ ’Kay.”
Her feet scuffed on the superstructure, heading aft. I stood up again and watched as she settled into the cover of the skimmer’s tail assembly, then turned my attention back to the closing signal. The radar set was a bare-minimum insurance-necessity installation, and it gave no detail beyond the steadily increasing blotch on the screen. But a couple of minutes later I didn’t need it. The gaunt, turreted silhouette rose on the horizon, came plowing toward us, and might as well have had an illuminum sign pasted on its prow.
PIRATE
.
Not dissimilar to a compact oceangoing hoverloader, it ran no navigation lights at all. It sat long and low on the surface of the Expanse, but bulked with crude plate armoring and weapons pods custom-welded to the original structure. I cranked neurachem vision and got the vague sense of figures moving about in low red lighting behind the glass panels at the nose, but no activity near the guns. As the vessel loomed and turned broadside to me, I saw lateral scrape marks in the metal of the skirt. Legacy of all the engagements that had ended in hull-to-hull boarding assault.
A spotlight snapped on and panned across me, then switched back and held. I held up my hand against the glare. Neurachem squeezed a view of silhouettes in a snub conning tower atop the pirate’s forward cabin. A young male voice, cranked tense with chemicals, floated across the soupy water.
“You Kovacs?”
“I’m Serendipity. What do you want?”
A dry, mirthless cackle. “Serendipity. Well, I just guess you fucking
are.
Serendipitous to the max from where I’m standing.”
“I asked you a question.”
“What do I want. Heard you. Well, what I
want,
first and foremost, I want your slim pal back there at the stern to stand down and put her hardware away. We’ve got her on infrared anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to turn her into panther feed with the vibe gun, but then you’d be upset, right?”
I said nothing.
“See, and you upset gets me nowhere. Supposed to keep you happy, Kovacs. Bring you along, but keep you happy. So your pal stands down,
I’m
happy, no need for fireworks and gore,
you’re
happy, you come along with me, people I work for are happy, they treat
me
right, I get even happier. Know what that’s called, Kovacs? That’s a virtuous circle.”
“Want to tell me who the people you work for are?”
“Well, yeah, I
want
to, obviously, but there’s just no way I
can,
see. Under contract, not a word to pass my lips about that shit till you’re at the table and doing the
something-for-you, something-for-me
boogie. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to take all of this on trust.”
Or be blasted apart trying to leave.
I sighed and turned to the stern.
“Come on out, Jad.”
There was a long pause, and then she emerged from the shadows of the tail assembly, shard blaster hanging at her side. I still had the neurachem up, and the look on her face said she’d rather have fought it out.
“That’s much better,” called the pirate cheerfully. “Now we’re all friends.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
His name was Vlad Tepes, named apparently not for the vegetation but after some dimly remembered folk hero from precolonial times. He was lanky and pale, wearing flesh like some cheap, young shaven-headed version of Jack Soul Brasil they’d thrown out at prototype stage. Flesh that something told me was his own, his first sleeve, in which case he wasn’t much older than Isa had been. There were acne scars on his cheeks that he fingered occasionally, and he trembled from head to foot with tetrameth overload. He overgestured and laughed too much, and at some point in his young life he’d had the bone of his skull opened at the temples and filled with jagged lightning-flash sections of purple-black alloy cement. The stuff glinted in the low light aboard the pirate vessel as he moved about, and when you looked at him head-on it gave his face a faintly demonic aspect that was obviously what was intended. The men and women around him on the bridge gave ground with alacrity to his jerky, meth-driven motion, and respect read out in their eyes as they watched him.
The radical surgery aside, he reminded me of Segesvar and myself at that age, so much that it ached.
The vessel, perhaps predictably, rejoiced in the name
Impaler,
and it ran due west at speed, trampling imperiously through obstacles smaller and less armored skimmers would have needed to go around.
“Got to,” Vlad informed us succinctly as something crunched under the armored skirt. “Everyone’s been looking for you on the Strip, and not very well is my guess, ’cause they didn’t find you, did they. Hah! Anyway, wasted a fuck of a lot of time that way and my clients, they seem pushed temporally, if you know what I mean.”
On the identity of the clients, he remained steadfastly closemouthed, which, on that much meth, is no mean feat.
“Look, be there soon, anyway,” he jittered, face twitching. “Why worry?”
In this at least, he was telling the truth. Barely an hour after we’d been taken aboard,
Impaler
slowed and drifted cautiously broadside toward a decayed ruin of a baling station in the middle of nowhere. The pirate’s coms officer ran a series of scrambled interrogation protocols, and whoever was inside the ruined station had a machine that knew the code. The coms woman looked up and nodded. Vlad stood glitter-eyed before his instrument displays and snapped instructions like insults.
Impaler
picked up a little lateral speed again, fired grapple lines into the evercrete dock pilings with a series of splintering smacks, and then cranked itself in tight. Green lights and a gangplank extended.
“Let’s go then, come on.” He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honor guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed; chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarized windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles, and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.
Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still . . .
I remembered the voyage aboard the
Angelfire Flirt,
the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.
And then everything came tumbling down.
“Hello, Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?”
Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil, and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.
“Didn’t see that one coming, huh?” he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?”
“Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?” He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. “Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there, too.”
I felt Jad bristle at my back.
“She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.”
He shrugged and nodded at my newly acquired pirate friends. “Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.”
It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.
“That was a joke,” he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.
“Yeah, I guessed.” Jad wandered past me to the windows and peered out at the moored bulk of the
Impaler.
“So Micky, Tak, Kovacs, whoever the fuck you are at the moment. Want to introduce me to your friend?”
“Uh, yeah. Tod, this is Jadwiga. As you obviously already know, she’s from deCom. Jad, Todor Murakami, colleague of mine from, uh, the old days.”
“I’m an Envoy,” Murakami supplied casually.
To her credit, Jad barely blinked. She took the hand he offered with a slightly incredulous smile, then propped herself against the outward lean of the tower windows and folded her arms.
Murakami took the hint.
“So what’s all this about?”
I nodded. “We can start there.”
“I think you can probably guess.”
“I think you can probably drop the elicitation and just tell me.”
He grinned and touched a trigger finger to his temple. “Sorry, force of habit. All right, look. Here’s my problem. According to sources, seems you’ve got a little revolutionary momentum up here, maybe enough to seriously rock the First Families’ boat.”
“Sources?”
Another grin. No ground given up. “That’s right. Sources.”
“I didn’t know you guys were deployed here.”
“We’re not.” A little of his Envoy cool slipped from him, as if by the admission he’d lost some kind of vital access to it. He scowled. “Like I said, this is pro bono. Damage limitation. You know as well as I do, we can’t afford a neoQuellist uprising.”
“Yeah?” This time, I was the one grinning. “Who’s
we,
Tod? The Protectorate? The Harlan family? Some other bunch of super-rich fucks?”
He gestured irritably. “I’m talking about all of us, Tak. You really think that’s what this planet needs, another Unsettlement. Another war?”
“Takes two sides to run a war, Tod. If the First Families wanted to accept the neoQuellist agenda, institute reforms, well.” I spread my hands. “Then I can’t see there’d be any need for an uprising at all. Maybe you should be talking to them.”
A frown. “Why are you talking like this, Tak? Don’t tell me you’re buying into this shit.”
I paused. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t
know
? What kind of fucked political philosophy is that?”
“It isn’t a philosophy at all, Tod. It’s just a feeling that maybe we’ve all had enough. That maybe it’s time to burn these motherfuckers down.”
He frowned. “I can’t allow that. Sorry.”
“So why don’t you just call down the wrath of the Envoys and stop wasting time?”
“Because I don’t fucking
want
the Corps here.” There was a sudden, brief desperation in his face as he spoke. “I’m
from
here, Tak. This is my home. You think I want to see the World turned into another Adoracion? Another Sharya?”
“Very noble of you.” Jad shifted against the canted windows, came forward to the table, and poked at the datacoil. Purple and red sparked around her fingers where they broke the field. “So what’s the battle plan, Mister Qualms?”
His eyes flickered between the two of us, came to rest on me. I shrugged.
“It’s a fair question, Tod.”
He hesitated for a moment. It made me think of the moment I’d had to unpin my own numbed fingers from the cable beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura. He was letting go of a lifetime of Envoy commitment here, and my own lapsed membership of the Corps wasn’t much in the way of a justification.
Finally, he grunted and spread his hands.
“Okay. Here’s the newsflash.” He pointed at me. “Your pal Segesvar has sold you out.”
I blinked. Then:
“No fucking way.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know.
Haiduci
dues, right? He owes you. Thing is, Tak, you got to ask yourself
which
of you he thinks he owes.”
Oh shit.
He saw it hit me and nodded again. “Yeah, I know all about that, too. See, Takeshi Kovacs saved Segesvar’s life a couple of centuries ago, objective time. But that’s something
both
copies of you did. Old Radul’s got a debt all right, but he apparently sees no reason to discharge it more than the once. And your younger, fresher self has just cut a deal on that very basis. Segesvar’s men took most of your beach-party revolutionaries early this morning. Would have gotten you, Vidaura, and the deCom woman, too, if you hadn’t all taken off on some crack-of-dawn errand to the Strip.”
“And now?” The last stubborn fragments of clinging hope. Scour them out, and face the facts with features carved out of stone. “They’ve got Vidaura and the others now?”
“Yes, they took them on their return. They’re holding everyone until Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka can arrive with a cleanup squad. Had you gone back with the others, you’d be sharing a locked room with them now. So.” A rapidly flexed smile, a raised brow. “Looks like you owe me a favor.”
I let the fury come aboard, like deep breath, like a swelling. Let it rage through me, then tamped it carefully down like a half-smoked seahemp cigar, saved for later. Lock it down, think.
“How come you know all this, Tod?”
He gestured, self-deprecating. “Like I said, I live here. Pays to keep the wires humming. You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know how it is. Who’s your fucking source, Tod?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
I shrugged. “Then I can’t help you.”
“You’re just going to let it all go? Segesvar sells you out, he gets to walk away? Your friends from the beach get to die? Come
on,
Tak.”
I shook my head. “I’m tired of fighting other people’s battles for them. Brasil and friends got themselves into this, they can get themselves out. And Segesvar will keep. I’ll get to him later.”
“And Vidaura?”
“What about her?”
“She trained us, Tak.”
“Yeah, us. Get on and save her yourself.”
If you weren’t an Envoy, you would have missed it. It was less than a flicker, some millimetric shift in stance, maybe not even that. But Murakami slumped.
“I can’t do it on my own,” he said quietly. “I don’t know the inside of Segesvar’s place, and without that I’d need an Envoy platoon to take it.”
“Then call in the Corps.”
“You know what that would do to—”
“Then tell me who your fucking source is.”
“Yeah,” said Jad sardonically, in the quiet that followed. “Or just ask him to come in from next door.”
She caught my eye and nodded at a closed drop-hatch in the back of the tower room. I took a step toward it and Murakami could barely hold himself back from the blocking move he wanted to make. He glared at Jad.
“Sorry,” she said, and tapped her head with a forefinger. “Dataflow alert. Pretty standard wincefish hardware. Your friend in there is using a phone, and he’s moving about a lot. Pacing nervously would be my guess.”
I grinned at Murakami. “Well, Tod. Your call.”
The tension lasted a couple of seconds more, then he sighed and gestured me forward.
“Go ahead. You would have worked it out sooner or later anyway.”
I went to the drop-hatch, found the panel, and thumbed it. The machinery grumbled to itself somewhere deep in the building. The hatch cranked upward in juddery, hesitant increments. I leaned into the space it left.
“Good evening. So which one of you’s the snitch?”
Four faces turned toward me, and as soon as I saw them, four severely dressed figures in black, the pieces thumped into place in my head like the sound of the drop-hatch reaching the end of its recess. Three were muscle, two men and and a woman, and the skin on their faces all had a shiny plastic elasticity where their facial tattooing had been sprayed over. It was a short-term, daily option that wouldn’t stand much professional scrutiny. But deep as they were into
haiduci
turf, it probably would save them from having to fight pitched battles on every Newpest street corner.
The fourth, the one holding the phone, was older but unmistakable by demeanor alone. I nodded my understanding.
“Tanaseda, I presume. Well, well.”
He bowed slightly. It went with the package, the same groomed, old-school manners and look. He wore no facial skin decoration because at the levels he’d attained, he would be a frequent visitor in First Family enclaves that would frown on it. But you could still see the honor scars where they had been removed without benefit of modern surgical technique. His gray-streaked black hair was bound back tightly in a short ponytail, the better to reveal the scarring across the forehead and accentuate the long bones of the face. The eyes beneath the brow were brown and hard like polished stones. The careful smile he gave me was the same one he would bestow upon death if and when it came for him.
“Kovacs-san.”
“So what’s your end of this, sam?” The muscle bristled collectively at my disrespect. I ignored it, glanced back at Murakami instead. “I take it you know he wants me Really Dead, as slowly and unpleasantly as possible.”