Murakami locked gazes with the yakuza senior.
“That can be resolved,” he murmured. “Is this not so, Tanaseda-san?”
Tanaseda bowed again. “It has come to my notice that though you were involved in the death of Hirayasu Yukio, you were not wholly to blame.”
“So?” I shrugged to displace the rising anger, because the only way he could have heard that little snippet was through virtual interrogation of Orr or Kiyoka or Lazlo, after my younger self helped him kill them. “Doesn’t usually cut much ice with you people, who’s really to blame or not.”
The woman in his entourage made a tiny growling sound deep in her throat. Tanaseda cut it with a tiny motion of his hand at his side, but the gaze he bent on me belied the calm in his tone.
“It has also become clear to me that you are in possession of Hirayasu Yukio’s cortical storage device.”
“Ah.”
“Is this so?”
“Well, if you think I’m going to let you search me for it, you can—”
“Tak.” Murakami’s voice came out lazy, but it wasn’t. “Behave. Do you have Hirayasu’s stack or not?”
I paused on the hinge of the moment, more than half of me hoping they might try to strong-arm it. The man on Tanaseda’s left twitched, and I smiled at him. But they were too well trained.
“Not on me,” I said.
“But you could deliver it to Tanaseda-san, could you not?”
“If I had any incentive to, I suppose I could, yes.”
The soft-throated snarl again, back and forth among all three of the yakuza muscle this time.
“Ronin,”
one of them spat.
I met his eye. “That’s right, sam. Masterless. So watch your step. There’s no one to call me to heel if I take a dislike to you.”
“Nor anyone to back you up when you find yourself in a corner,” observed Tanaseda. “May we please dispense with this childishness, Kovacs-san? You speak of incentives. Without the information I have supplied, you would now be captive with your colleagues, awaiting execution. And I have offered to revoke my own writ for your elimination. Is this not enough for the return of a cortical stack you have in any case no use for?”
I smiled. “You’re full of shit, Tanaseda. You’re not doing this for Hirayasu. He’s a fucking waste of good sea air, and you know it.”
The yakuza master seemed to coil tighter into himself as he stared at me. I still wasn’t sure why I was pushing him, what I was pushing for.
“Hirayasu Yukio is my brother-in-law’s only son.” Very quietly, barely a murmur across the space between us, but edged with contained fury. “There is
giri
here that I would not expect a southerner to understand.”
“Mother
fucker,
” said Jad wonderingly.
“Ah, what do you expect, Jad?” I made a noise in my throat. “In the end, he’s a criminal, no different than the fucking
haiduci.
Just a different mythology and the same crabshit delusions of ancient honor.”
“Tak—”
“Back off, Tod. Let’s get this out in the open where it belongs. This is politics, and nothing even remotely cleaner. Tanaseda here isn’t worried about his nephew once removed. That’s just a side bonus. He’s worried he’s losing his grip, he’s afraid of being punished for a fucked-up blackmail attempt. He’s watching Segesvar get ready to make friends with Aiura Harlan, and he’s terrified the
haiduci
are going to get cut in on some serious global action in return for their trouble. All of which his Millsport cousins are likely to lay pretty directly at his front door, along with a short sword and a set of instructions that read
insert here and slice sideways.
Right, Tan?”
The muscle on the left lost it, as I suspected he might. A needle-thin blade dropped from his sleeve into his right hand. Tanaseda snapped something at him and he froze. His eyes blazed at me and his knuckles whitened around the hilt of the knife.
“See,” I told him. “Masterless samurai don’t have this problem. There’s no leash. If you’re
ronin,
you don’t have to watch honor sold out for political expediency.”
“Tak, will you just fucking shut up,” groaned Murakami.
Tanaseda stepped past the taut, rippling tension on the furious bodyguard. He watched me through narrowed eyes, as if I were some kind of poisonous insect he needed to examine more closely.
“Tell me, Kovacs-san,” he said quietly. “Is it your wish to die at the hands of my organization after all? Are you
looking
for death?”
I held his eye for a few seconds, then made a tiny spitting sound.
“You couldn’t even begin to understand what I’m looking for, Tanaseda. You wouldn’t recognize it if it bit your dick off. And if you did stumble on it by accident, you’d just find some way to sell it.”
I looked across to Murakami, whose hand rested still on the butt of the Kalashnikov at his waist. I nodded.
“All right, Tod. I’ve seen your snitch. I’m in.”
“Then we have an agreement?” Tanaseda asked.
I compressed a breath and turned back to face him. “Just tell me this. How long ago did Segesvar cut his deal with the other copy of me?”
“Oh, not recently.” I couldn’t tell if there was any satisfaction in his voice. “I believe he has known that you both exist for some weeks now. Your copied self has been most active in tracing old connections.”
I thought back to Segesvar’s appearance at the inland harbor. His voice over the phone.
We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake and a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.
I wondered if, even then, he’d already been making a decision, savoring the curious circumstance of being able to choose a place for his indebtedness to reside.
If so, I hadn’t done myself any favors in the competition with my younger self. And Segesvar had made it plain, the previous night, almost come out and said it to my face.
Certainly can’t expect to have a good time
with
you anymore. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.
Like I said—
Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.
Had he been saying goodbye?
You’re a hard man to please, Tak.
Can I interest you in some team sports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?
For just a second, an old, small sadness welled up in me.
The anger trampled it down. I looked up at Tanaseda and nodded.
“Your nephew is buried under a beach house south of Kem Point. I’ll draw you a map. Now give me what you’ve got.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“Why did you do that, Tak?”
“Do what?”
I stood with Murakami under Angier glow from
Impaler
’s directional spotlights, watching the yakuza depart in an elegant black Expansemobile that Tanaseda had called in by phone. They plowed away southward, leaving a broad, churned wake the color of milky vomit.
“Why did you push him like that?”
I stared after the receding skimmer. “Because he’s scum. Because he’s a fucking criminal, and he won’t admit it.”
“Getting a little judgmental in your old age, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the southern outlook. You’re from Millsport, Tod, maybe you’re just standing too close to see it.”
He chuckled. “Okay. So what’s the view like from down here?”
“Same as it’s always been. The yakuza handing out their ancient-tradition-of-honor line to anyone who’ll listen, and meantime doing what? Working the same crabshit criminality as everybody else, but cozied up with the First Families into the bargain.”
“Not so much anymore, looks like.”
“Ah, come on, Tod. You know better than that. These guys have been in bed with Harlan and the rest of them since we fucking got here. Tanaseda might have to pay for this Qualgrist fuckup he’s perpetrated, but the others will just make the right polite noises of regret and slide out from under. Back to the same illicit goods and genteel extortion line they’ve always trawled. And the First Families will welcome it with open arms because it’s one more thread in the net they’ve thrown over us all.”
“You know.” The laughter was still in his voice. “You’re beginning to sound like her.”
I looked around at him.
“Like who?”
“Like Quell, man. You sound like Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”
That sat between us for a couple of seconds. I turned away and stared out into the darkness over the Expanse. Perhaps recognizing the unresolved tensions in the air between myself and Murakami, Jad had opted to leave us alone on the dock while the yakuza were still preparing to depart. The last I saw of her, she was boarding the
Impaler
with Vlad and the honor guard. Something about getting whiskey coffee.
“All right then, Tod,” I said evenly. “How about you answer me this. Why did Tanaseda come running to you to put his life right?”
He pulled a face.
“You said it yourself, I’m Millsport-born and -bred. And the yak like to be plugged in at high level. They’ve been all over me since I came home on my first Corps furlough a hundred and whatever years ago. They think we’re old friends.”
“And are you?”
I felt the stare. Ignored it.
“I’m an Envoy, Tak,” he said finally. “You want to remember that.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m
your
friend.”
“I’m already sold, Tod. You don’t need to run this routine on me. I’ll take you in Segesvar’s back door on condition you help me fuck him up. Now what’s your end?”
He shrugged. “Aiura has to go down for breach of Protectorate directives. Double-sleeving an Envoy—”
“Ex-Envoy.”
“Speak for yourself.
He’s
never been officially discharged, even if you have. And even for keeping the copy in the first place, someone in the Harlan hierarchy has to pay. That’s erasure-mandatory.”
There was an oddly ragged edge on his voice now. I looked more closely at him. The obvious truth hit home.
“You think they’ve got one of you, too, don’t you?”
A wry grin. “There’s something special about you, you’d be the only one they copied? Come on, Tak. Does that make any sense? I checked the records. That intake, there were about a dozen of us recruited from Harlan’s World. Whoever decided on this brilliant little piece of insurance back then, they would have copied us all. We need Aiura alive long enough to tell us where in the Harlan datastacks we can find them.”
“All right. What else?”
“You know what else,” he said quietly.
I went back to watching the Expanse. “I’m not going to help you slaughter Brasil and the others, Tod.”
“I’m not asking you to. For Virginia’s sake alone, I’ll try to avoid that. But someone has to pay the Bugs’ bill. Tak, they murdered Mitzi Harlan on the streets of Millsport!”
“Big loss. Across the globe, skullwalk editors weep.”
“All right,” he said grimly. “They also killed fuck knows how many other incidental victims in the process. Law enforcement. Innocent bystanders. I’ve got the latitude to seal this operation up afterward, marked
regime unrest stabilized,
no need for further deployment. But I’ve
got
to show scapegoats, or the Corps auditors are going to be all over it like livewire. You know that, you know how it works.
Someone
has to pay.”
“Or be seen to.”
“Or be seen to. But it needn’t be Virginia.”
“
Ex-Envoy heads planetary rebellion.
No, I can see how that wouldn’t play too well with the Corps’ public relations people.”
He stopped. Stared at me with sudden hostility.
“Is that really what you think of me?”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “No. I’m sorry.”
“I’m doing my best to nail this shut with a minimum of pain to people who matter, Tak. And you’re not helping.”
“I know.”
“I need someone for Mitzi Harlan’s murder, and I need a ringleader. Someone who’ll play well as the evil genius behind all this shit. Maybe a couple of others to bulk up the arrest list.”
If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.
Koi’s words in the beached and stalled-out hoverloader on Vchira. The words and the flicker of passion around his face as he spoke them, the passion, perhaps, of a martyr who had missed his moment once before and did not intend to again.
Koi, ex–Black Brigade.
But Sierra Tres had said much the same thing while we hid in the channels and fallen ruins of Eltevedtem. And Brasil’s demeanor said it for him, all the time. Maybe what they all wanted was martyrdom in a cause older and greater and weightier than themselves.
I pushed my thoughts aside, derailed them before they could get where they were going.
“And Sylvie Oshima?” I asked.
“Well.” Another shrug. “As I understand it, she’s been contaminated by something from the Uncleared Zones. So allowing we can salvage her from the firefight, we have her cleansed, and then hand her back her life. Does that sound reasonable?”
“It sounds untenable.”
I remembered Sylvie talking about the command software aboard
Guns for Guevara. No matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterward, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things.
If Koi could fight and die for a ghost, who knew what the neoQuellists would make of Sylvie Oshima, even after her headgear was wiped.
“Is it?”
“Come on, Tod. She’s iconic. Whatever is or isn’t inside her, she could be the focus for a whole new neoQuellist wave. The First Families will want her liquidated on principle.”
Murakami grinned fiercely.
“What the First Families want and what they get from me are going to be two
radically
different things, Tak.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He slurred it, for mockery. “Because if they don’t cooperate fully, I’ll promise them an Envoy deployment at assault strength.”
“And if they call your bluff?”
“Tak, I’m an Envoy. Brutalizing planetary regimes is what we
do.
They’ll fold like a fucking deck chair, and you know it. They’re going to be so fucking grateful for the escape clause, they’d have their own children queuing up to tongue my ass clean if I asked.”
I looked at him then, and for just a moment it was as if a door had blown open on my Envoy past. He stood there, still grinning in the glare from the Angier spots, and he could have been me. And I remembered what it had really been like. It wasn’t the belonging that came flooding back to me this time, it was the brutal power of Corps enablement. The liberating savagery that rose out of a bone-deep knowledge that you were feared. That you were whispered of across the Settled Worlds and that even in the corridors of governance on Earth, the power brokers grew quiet at your name. It was a rush that came on like branded-supply tetrameth. Men and women who might wreck or simply remove from the balance sheet a hundred thousand lives with a gesture, those men and women could be taught fear again, and the instrument of that lesson was the Envoy Corps. Was you.
I forced an answering smile.
“You’re charming, Tod. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
“Nope.”
And out of nowhere, the smile stopped being forced. I laughed and it seemed to shake something loose inside me.
“All right. Talk to me, you bastard. How do we do this?”
He gave me the clownish raised brows again. “I was hoping you’d tell me. You’re the one with the floor plans.”
“Yeah, I meant what’s our assault strength. You’re not planning to use—”
Murakami jerked a thumb at the bulk of
Impaler.
“Our spiky-minded friends there? I certainly am.”
“Fuck, Tod, they’re a bunch of methhead kids. The
haiduci
are going to shred them.”
He gestured dismissively. “Work with the tools to hand, Tak. You know how it is. They’re young and angry and cranked up on meth, just looking for someone to take it out on. They’ll keep Segesvar occupied long enough for us to get in and do the real damage.”
I glanced at my watch. “You planning to do this tonight?”
“Dawn tomorrow. We’re waiting on Aiura, and according to Tanaseda she won’t get in until the early hours. Oh yeah.” He tipped his head back and nodded at the sky. “And there’s the weather.”
I followed his gaze. Thick, dark battlements of cloud were piled up overhead, toppling steadily westward across a fragmentary, orange-tinged sky where Hotei’s light still struggled to make itself felt. Daikoku had long ago drowned in a muffled glow on the horizon. And now that I noticed, there was a fresh breeze across the Expanse that carried the unmistakable smell of the sea.
“What about the weather?”
“It’s going to change.” Murakami sniffed. “That storm that was supposed to blow itself out in the southern Nurimono? Didn’t. And now it seems it’s picked up a scoop from some freak northwesterly run-on, and it’s hooking. It’s coming back around.”
Ebisu’s Eavesdrop.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m not sure, Tak. It’s a fucking weather forecast. But even if we don’t catch the full force of it, a bit of hard wind and horizontal rain wouldn’t go amiss, would it? Chaotic systems, just where we need them.”
“That,” I said carefully, “depends very much on how good a pilot your shaky friend Vlad turns out to be. You know what they call a hookback like this down here, don’t you?”
Murakami looked at me blankly.
“No. Rough luck?”
“No, they call it Ebisu’s Eavesdrop. After the fisherman host story?”
“Oh right.”
This far south, Ebisu isn’t himself. In the north and equatorial regions of Harlan’s World, JapAmanglic cultural dominance makes him the folk god of the sea, patron of sailors, and, generally speaking, a good-natured deity to have around. Saint Elmo is cheerily co-opted as an analog or helper god, so as to include and not upset the more Christian-influenced residents. But in Kossuth, where the East European worker heritage that helped build the World is strong, this live-and-let-live approach is not reciprocated. Ebisu emerges as a demonic submarine presence to scare children to bed with, a monster that in legend saints like Elmo must do battle with to protect the faithful.
“You remember how that story ends?” I asked.
“Sure. Ebisu bestows all these fantastic gifts on the fishermen in return for their hospitality, but he forgets his fishing rod, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, uh, he comes back to get it and just as he’s about to knock he hears the fishermen running down his personal hygiene. His hands smell of fish, he doesn’t clean his teeth, his clothes are shabby. All that stuff you’re supposed to teach kids, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I remember telling this stuff to Suki and Markus, back when they were small.” Murakami’s gaze grew distant, hazed out on the horizon and the gathering clouds there. “Got to be nearly half a century ago now. You believe that?”
“Finish the story, Tod.”
“Right. Well, uh, let’s see. Ebisu’s pissed off so he stalks in, grabs his rod, and as he storms out again, all the gifts he’s given turn to rotting belaweed and dead fish in his wake. He plunges into the sea and the fishermen have crap catches for months afterward. Moral of the tale—look after your personal hygiene, but
even more important, kids,
don’t talk about people behind their backs.”
He looked back at me.
“How’d I do?”
“Pretty good for fifty years on. But down here, they tell it a little different. See, Ebisu’s hideously ugly, tentacled and beaked and fanged, he’s a terrifying sight, and the fishermen have a hard time not just running away screaming. But they master their fear and offer him hospitality anyway, which you’re not supposed to do for a demon. So Ebisu gives them all sorts of gifts stolen from ships he’s sunk in the past, and then he leaves. The fishermen heave a massive sigh of relief and start talking it up, how monstrous he was, how terrifying, how smart they all were to get all these gifts out of him, and in the midst of it all back he comes for his trident.”
“Not a rod, then?”
“No, not scary enough I guess. It’s a massive, barbed trident in this version.”
“You’d think they’d have noticed when he left it behind, wouldn’t you?”
“
Shut
up. Ebisu overhears them bad-mouthing him and slips away in a black fury, only to come back in the form of a huge storm that obliterates the whole village. Those not drowned get dragged down by his tentacles to an eternity of agony in a watery hell.”
“Lovely.”
“Yeah, similar moral. Don’t talk about people behind their backs but
even more important
don’t trust those filthy foreign deities from up north.” I lost my smile. “Last time I saw Ebisu’s Eavesdrop, I was still a kid. It came off the sea at the eastern end of Newpest and ripped the inland settlements apart for kilometers along the Expanse shoreline. Killed a hundred people without even trying. It drowned half the weed freighters in the inland harbor before anyone could power them up. The wind picked up the lightweight skimmers and threw them down the streets as far as Harlan Park. Around here, the Eavesdrop is very bad luck.”