He shook his head, mock-sorrowful. “You really are getting past your sell-by date, aren’t you? You think I’m going to go back to the Harlan family with a
corpse
when I can take a live sleeve? That’s not what I’m getting paid for. That was a stun grenade, my last one unfortunately. Didn’t you hear it crack? Kind of hard to mistake if you’ve been anywhere near a battlefield recently. Ah, but then maybe you haven’t. Shock wave knockout and inhaled molecular shrapnel to keep everyone that way. She’ll be out all day.”
“Don’t lecture me on battlefield weaponry, Kovacs. I fucking
was
you, and I gave it up to do something more interesting.”
“Really?” The anger sparked in the startling blue eyes. “What was that, then? Low-grade criminality or failed revolutionary politics? They tell me you’ve had a crack at both.”
I stalked forward a step and watched him draw into a combat guard.
“Whatever they
tell
you, I have seen a century more sunrises than you. And now I’m going to take them all away from you.”
“Yeah?” He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Well if they’re all leading up to what you are now, you’d be doing me a favor. Because whatever else happens to me, the one thing I never want to be is you. I’d rather blow my own stack out the back of my head than end up standing where you are now.”
“Then why don’t you do that. It’ll save me the trouble.”
He laughed. It was meant to be contemptuous, I think, but didn’t quite make it. There was a nervousness to it, and too much emotion. He made a displacement gesture.
“Man, I’m almost tempted to let you walk away, I feel so sorry for you.”
I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not going to let you take her back to Harlan again. This is over.”
“It certainly fucking is. I can’t believe how totally you’ve fucked up your life. Just fucking look at you.”
“You look at me. It’s the last face you’re ever going to see, you stupid little fuck.”
“Don’t get melodramatic on me, old man.”
“Oh, you think this is melodrama?”
“No.” This time he got the edge on the contempt about right. “It’s too fucking pitiful even for that. It’s
wildlife.
You’re like some lame old wolf that can’t keep up with the pack anymore, has to hang around on the fringes and hope it can grab some meat no one else wants. I can’t
believe
you fucking quit the Corps, man. I can’t
fucking
believe it.”
“Yeah, well, you weren’t fucking there,” I snapped.
“Yeah, because if I had been, it never would have happened. You think
I
would have let it all go down the drain like that? Just fucking walked away, like Dad did?”
“Hey,
fuck you
!”
“You left them just the same, you fuck. You walked out on the Corps and you walked out of their lives.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. They needed me in their lives like a fucking webjelly in a swimming pool. I was a
criminal.
”
“That’s right, you were. What do you want, a fucking medal for it?”
“Oh what would
you
have done? You’re an ex-Envoy. You know what that means? Barred from holding public office, military rank, or any corporate post above menial level. No access to legal credit facilities. You’re so fucking smart, what would you have done with that hand?”
“I wouldn’t have quit in the first place.”
“You weren’t fucking there.”
“Oh, okay. What would I have done as an ex-Envoy? I don’t know. But what I do fucking know is that I wouldn’t have ended up like you after nearly two hundred years. Alone, broke, and dependent on Radul Segesvar and a bunch of fucking
surfers.
You know I tracked you to Rad before you got here yourself. Did you know that?”
“Of course I did.”
He stumbled for a moment. Not much Envoy poise in his voice; he was too angry.
“Yeah, and did you know we’ve plotted just about every move you’ve made since Tekitomura? Did you know I set up the ambush at Rila?”
“Yes, that bit seemed to go especially well.”
A new increment of rage twisted his face. “It didn’t fucking matter, because we had Rad anyway. We were covered from the start. Why do you think you got away so fucking easily?”
“Uh, because the orbitals shot down your swoopcopter, and the rest of you were too fucking incompetent to track us into the Northern arm perhaps?”
“Fuck you. You think we looked hard for you? We knew where you were going, man, right from the start. We’ve been on you right from the fucking start.”
Enough.
It was a hard pellet of decision in the center of my chest, and it drove me forward, hands raised.
“Well, then,” I said softly. “All you’ve got to do now is finish it. Think you can manage that all on your own?”
There was a long moment when we stared at each other, and the inevitability of the fight dripped down behind our eyes. Then he rushed me.
Shattering blows to throat and groin, unwrapping from a tightly gathered line of attack that drove me back a full two meters before I could contain it. I turned the groin strike on a sweeping block downward with one arm and dropped low enough to take the throat chop on the forehead. My own counter exploded at the same time, directly up and into the base of his chest. He staggered, tried to hook my arm with a favorite aikido move I recognized so well that I nearly laughed. I broke free of it and stabbed at his eyes with stiffened fingers. He swept a tight, graceful circle out of reach and unleashed a side kick into my ribs. It was too high, and it wasn’t fast enough. I grabbed the foot and twisted savagely. He rolled with it, took the fall, and kicked for my head with his other foot as momentum rolled him through the air. His instep cracked me across the face—I was already backing off, rapidly, to avoid the full force of the kick. I lost my hold on his foot, and my vision flew briefly apart. I staggered back against the grav sled as he hit the ground. It bobbed on its fields and held me up. I shook my head to get the airy lightness out of it.
It wasn’t quite as savage as it should have been. We were both tired and relying inevitably on the conditioned systems in the sleeves we wore. We were both making mistakes that under other circumstances might have been lethal. And perhaps, we were neither of us really sure what we were doing here in the quiet, mist-tinged unreality of the empty dock.
The aspirants believe . . .
Sylvie’s voice, brooding in the capacity vault.
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.
I spat and drew breath. Got off the curve of the grav sled cover.
If you let it be.
Across the dock, he climbed back to his feet. I got in fast, while he was still recovering; summoned everything I had left. He saw it coming and twisted to meet me. Kick-turned off a raised and crooked leg, fists brushed aside on a pivoting double-handed block across his head and chest. I lunged past on deflected momentum and he followed me around, elbow hooking into the back of my head. I went down before he could do more damage, rolled and flailed in an attempt to knock his feet out from under him. He danced aside, took the time to snarl a grin, and came back in, stamping.
For the second time that morning, my time sense dissolved. Combat conditioning and the jacked-up Eishundo nervous system slowed everything to a crawl, blurry motion scrawled around the approaching strike and behind it the bared teeth of his grin.
Stop laughing, you fuck.
Segesvar’s face, long decades of bitterness contorting to rage and then despair as my taunts sheared through the armor of illusions he’d built up for himself over a lifetime of violence.
Murakami, fistful of bloody excised stacks, shrugging back at me like a mirror.
Mother, and the dream and—
—and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out toward me—
—tidal rage, rising—
—I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door—
—I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands
are
weapons—
—a shadow play—
His foot came down. It seemed to take forever. I rolled at the last moment, into him. Committed, he had nowhere to go. The blow landed on my upturned shoulder and unbalanced him. I kept rolling and he stumbled. Luck put one of his heels against something lying on the dock. Sylvie’s motionless form. He toppled backward over her.
I came upright, hurdled Sylvie’s body, and this time I caught him before he could regain his feet. I put a brutal kick into the side of his head. Blood jumped in the air as his scalp tore. Another, before he could roll. His mouth tore and spilled more blood. He slumped, propped himself groggily up, and I landed hard on his right arm and chest with all my weight. He grunted and I thought I felt the arm snap. I lashed down with open palm to his temple. His head rolled, his eyes fluttered. I drew up for the chop to the throat that would crush his larynx.
—a shadow play—
Self-hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand.
It’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.
I stared down at him. He was barely moving; he’d be easy to kill.
I stared at him.
Self-hatred—
Shadow play—
Mother—
Out of nowhere, an image of hanging beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura from a grip welded shut. Paralyzed and suspended. I saw my hand clamped on the cable, holding me up. Keeping me alive.
Locking me in place.
I saw myself unhinge the grip, one numbed finger at a time, and move.
I got up.
I got off him and stepped back. Stood staring, trying to work out what I’d just done. He blinked up at me.
“You know,” I said, and my voice jammed rustily. I had to start again, quietly, wearily. “You know, fuck you. You weren’t at Innenin, you weren’t on Loyko, you weren’t at Sanction Four or Hun Home. You’ve never even been to Earth. What the fuck do you know?”
He spat out blood. Sat up and wiped his smashed mouth. I laughed mirthlessly and shook my head.
“You know what, let’s see
you
do it better. Think you can sidestep all my fuckups? Go on then. Fucking try.” I moved aside and waved at the moored ranks of skimmers by the dock. “Got to be a few of those that weren’t shot up all that badly. Choose your own ride out of here. No one’s going to be looking for you, get moving while you’re ahead.”
He picked himself up a fraction at a time. His eyes never left mine; his hands trembled with tension, floating at guard. Maybe I hadn’t broken his arm after all. I laughed again, and it felt better this time.
“I mean it. Let’s see you steer my fucking life better than I have. Let’s see you not end up like I have.
Go on.
”
He stepped past me, still wary, face grim.
“I will,” he said. “I don’t see how I could do much worse.”
“Then fucking
go. Get the fuck out of here.
” I grabbed at the fresh anger, the urge to knock him down again and finish it. I cranked it back down. It took surprisingly little effort. My voice came out even again. “Don’t fucking stand here bitching to me about it,
let’s see you do better.
”
He gave me one more guarded look, and then he walked away, to the edge of the dock and toward the less damaged skimmers.
I watched him go.
A dozen meters away, he paused and turned back. I thought he started to lift one hand.
And a liquid gout of blaster fire splashed out from across the dock. It caught him in the head and chest and torched away everything in its path. He stood for a moment, gone from the chest up, and then the smoking ruins of his body collapsed sideways, over the edge of the dock, bounced off the nose carapace of the nearest skimmer and slid into the water with a flat splash.
Something tiny stabbed up under my ribs. A small noise came seeping up through me and I locked it down behind my teeth. I spun, weaponless, in the direction the blast had come from.
Jadwiga stepped out of a doorway in the baling station. From somewhere she’d gotten hold of Murakami’s plasmafrag rifle, or one very like it. She held it propped upright on her hip. The heat haze still shimmered around the muzzle.
“I take it you’ve not got a problem with that,” she called across the breeze and the dead quiet between us.
I closed my eyes and stood there, just breathing.
It didn’t help.
EPILOGUE
From the deck of
Haiduci’s Daughter,
the coastline of Kossuth fades to a low charcoal line astern. Tall, ugly clouds are still just visible farther south where the storm blunders about the western end of the Expanse, losing force in the shallow waters and dying. The forecasts are for calm seas and sunshine all the way north. Japaridze reckons he could get us to Tekitomura in record time, and he’d happily do it for the money we’ve paid him. But a sudden sprint north from an aging freight hoverloader would probably just get us noticed, and that’s not what we need right now. The slow, commonplace commercial rhythm of the stopping route up the western coast of the Saffron Archipelago makes a far better cover. And timing is the key.
Somewhere, I know, there’s an investigation ripping through the corridors of power in Millsport. The Envoy ops auditors have been needlecast in and are picking over the scant debris of Murakami’s covert operation. But like the fading storm on the Expanse, it isn’t going to touch us. We’ve got time; if we’re lucky, all the time we need. The Qualgrist virus is creeping steadily through the global population, and the threat it poses will drive the Harlan family out of their aristo flesh and back into the datastacks with their ancestors. The power vacuum their withdrawal creates at the center of things will suck the rest of the First Families oligarchy into a political maelstrom that they’ll handle badly, and then things will begin to fall apart. The yakuza, the
haiduci,
and the Protectorate will circle like bottlebacks around a weakened elephant ray, waiting for outcome and watching each other. But they won’t move yet, any of them.
That’s what Quellcrist Falconer believes, and though sometimes it sounds a little too slick, like Soseki Koi’s march-of-history rhetoric, I’m inclined to agree with her. I’ve seen this process on other worlds, in some places I’ve worked to bring it about, and there’s the ring of truth to her projections. Plus she was there for the Unsettlement, and that makes her a bigger expert on political change on Harlan’s World than any of us.
It’s strange, being around her. Bad enough that you know you’re talking to a centuries-old historical legend--that knowledge is a fluctuating thing, sometimes vague, sometimes eerily immediate. But beyond it, there’s the increasing fluidity with which she comes and goes, switching places with Sylvie Oshima the way Japaridze changes watch on the bridge with his first officer. Sometimes you’ll see it happen, and it’s like a flash of static across her face--then she blinks it away and you’re dealing with a different woman. At other times, I have moments when I’m not sure which of them I’m talking to. I have to watch the way the face moves, listen to the cadences of the voice again.
I wonder if, in the decades to come, this slippery new kind of identity is going to become a common human reality. From what Sylvie tells me when she’s up, there’s no reason why not. The potential in the deCom systems is almost unlimited. It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.
I try not to think too much about Segesvar and the others. Especially the other Kovacs. Slowly, I’m talking to Jad again because in the end I can’t blame her for what she did. And Virginia Vidaura, the night we pulled out of Newpest harbor aboard
Haiduci’s Daughter,
gave me an object lesson in learning to let these things go. We fucked, gently, careful of her slowly healing face, and then she wept and talked to me about Jack Soul Brasil all night. I listened and soaked it up, the way she trained me a century ago. And in the morning, she took my waking erection in her hand, pumped it and mouthed it and slid it inside herself and we fucked again, and then got up to face the day. She hasn’t mentioned Brasil since, and when I did, inadvertently, she blinked and smiled, and the tears never made it out of her eyes onto her face.
We are all learning to put these things away, to live with our losses, and to worry instead about something we can change.
Oishii Eminescu once told me there was no point in toppling the First Families because it would only bring the Protectorate and the Envoys down on Harlan’s World. He thought Quellism would have failed if the Envoys had existed during the Unsettlement. I think he was probably right, and even Quell herself has a hard time arguing it any other way, though when the sun is going down over a burnished evening ocean and we sit on deck with tumblers of whiskey, she likes to try.
It doesn’t really matter. Because down in the capacity vault, stretching minutes into months, Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals. By the time we get to Tekitomura, Sylvie at least thinks they’ll have it down. And from there she thinks they can teach the same trick to Oishii and maybe some other like-minded deComs.
And then we’ll be ready.
The mood aboard
Haiduci’s Daughter
is quiet and grim, but there’s an undercurrent of hope to it whose unfamiliar edges I’m still feeling my way around. It isn’t going to be glorious, it isn’t going to be bloodless. But I’m beginning to think it can be done. I think, given the circumstances and a little angelfire, we may be able to bring down the First Families, chase out the yakuza and the
haiduci
or at least bring them to heel. I think we may be able to warn off the Protectorate and the Envoys, and then, if there’s anything left, we’ll maybe give Quell’s demodynamic nanotech a shot.
And I can’t help believing--hoping, maybe--that an orbital platform that can reach down and wipe out at one and the same time a hoverloader full of people and the minute bindings on two individual humans’ hands, that can destroy and record at the same time, that can decant whole minds back into datasystems on the ground--I can’t help believing that the same system may be able someday to look down at the fringes of the Nurimono Ocean and find a pair of decades-abandoned weed-grown cortical stacks.
And bring back to life what they hold.