Hey, fuck Leo Mecsek. We told him what it’d cost. He can’t afford it, whose problem is that supposed to be? We’re supposed to cut corners and endanger Envoy lives so he can hand the First Families back some more of the tax they pay? Fuck that. We’re not fucking locals.
You’re a local, Tod,
I felt driven to point out.
Millsport-born and -bred.
You know what I mean.
I knew what he meant. Local government don’t get to punch keys on the Envoy Corps. The Envoys go where the Protectorate needs them, and most local governments pray to whatever gods they give house room that they’ll never be found wanting enough for that contingency to be invoked. The aftermath of Envoy intervention can be very unpleasant for all concerned.
This whole tendering angle’s fucked anyway.
Todor plumed fresh smoke out over the rail.
No one can afford us, no one trusts us. Can’t see the point, can you?
I thought it was about offsetting nonoperational costs while you guys were sitting on your asses undeployed.
Oh yeah. Which is when?
Really? I heard it was all pretty quiet right now. Since Hun Home, I mean. Going to tell me some covert insurgency tales?
Hey, sam.
He passed me the pipe.
You’re not on the team anymore. Remember?
I remembered.
Innenin!
It bursts on the edges of memory like a downed marauder bomb going up distant, but not far enough off to be safe. Red laser fire and the screams of men dying as the Rawling virus eats their minds alive.
I shivered a little and drew on the pipe. With Envoy-tuned sensitivity, Todor spotted it and shifted subject.
So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organized crime.
Yeah.
I looked at him bleakly.
Where’d you hear that, then?
A shrug.
Around. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?
The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu’s neck.
Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now. Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior, too, presumably. Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuckup he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan’s World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right. Organized crime is like that. Radul Segesvar’s Newpest
haiduci
mafia or the yak, north or south, they’re all the fucking same. Fucking blood-tie junkies.
War with the yakuza.
Why you going up north again?
I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago.
“Micky?” For a moment, the name meant nothing to me. “Hey, Mick, you okay?”
I looked up. She was watching me with narrow concern. I forced a nod.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Well, do you think you could pick it up a bit? Orr’ll be back and he’ll want to get started.”
“Sure.” I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. “I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.”
“You’ll see.”
“Party trick, huh?”
She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamor of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.
“Why don’t you come with us, Micky?”
I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. “What?”
“Come with us.”
“To
Drava
?”
“Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?”
I freed the blade and finished the incision. “I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.”
“What if I could set that up for you?”
“Sylvie.” I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward. “Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?”
She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realization that there was something here.
“Last time we were out,” she said slowly, “we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete resleeving unit, and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.”
“Well, that’d make sense. That’s where you’re taking Jadwiga?”
She nodded.
I looked pensively at the chunk of spine in my hand, the ragged-lipped wound it had come out of. I thought about what the yakuza would do to me if they caught up with me in this sleeve.
“How long are you going over for?”
She shrugged. “Long as it takes. We’re provisioned for three months, but last time we filled our quota in half that time. You could come back sooner if you like. The ’loaders run out of Drava all the time.”
“And you’re sure this stuff in the bunker is still functional?”
She grinned and shook her head.
“What?”
“It’s New Hok, Micky. Over there,
everything’s
still functional. That’s the whole problem with the fucking place.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The hoverloader
Guns for Guevara
was exactly what she sounded like—a low-profile, heavily armored shark of a vessel, spiking weaponry along her back like dorsal spines. In marked contrast with the commercial ’loaders that plied the routes between Millsport and the Saffron Archipelago, she had no external decks or towers. The bridge was a snubbed blister on the forward facings of the dull gray superstructure, and her flanks swept back and out in smooth, featureless curves. The two loading hatches, open on either side of her nose, looked built to disgorge flights of missiles.
“You sure this is going to work?” I asked Sylvie as we reached the downward slope of the docking ramp.
“Relax,” growled Orr, behind me. “This isn’t the Saffron Line.”
He was right. For an operation that the government claimed was being run under stringent security guidelines, deCom embarkation struck me as sloppy in the extreme. At the side of each hatch, a steward in a soiled blue uniform was taking
hardcopy
documentation and running the authorization flashes under a reader that wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a Settlement-years experia flick. The ragged queues of embarking personnel snaked back and forth across the ramp, ankle deep in carry-on baggage. Bottles and pipes passed back and forth in the cold, bright air. There was highly strung hilarity and mock-sparring up and down the lines, repeated jokes over the antique reader. The stewards smiled back repeatedly, wearily.
“And where the fuck is Las?” Kiyoka wanted to know.
Sylvie shrugged. “He’ll be here. He always is.”
We joined the back of the nearest queue. The little knot of deComs ahead of us glanced around briefly, spent a couple of measured looks on Sylvie’s hair, then went back to their bickering. She wasn’t unusual among this crowd. A tall black sleeve a couple of groups down had a dreadlocked mane of similar proportions, and there were others less imposing here and there.
Jadwiga stood quiet beside me.
“This thing with Las is pathological,” Kiyoka told me, looking anywhere but at Jad. “He’s always fucking late.”
“It’s wired into him,” said Sylvie absently. “You don’t get to be a career wincefish without a tendency toward brinkmanship.”
“Hey,
I’m
a wincefish, and I turn up on time.”
“You’re not a lead wincefish,” said Orr.
“Oh
right.
Listen we’re all—” She glanced at Jadwiga and bit her lip. “Lead’s just a player position. Las is wired no different from me or—”
Looking at Jad, you’d never have guessed she was dead. We’d cleaned her up in the apartment—beam weapons cauterize, there’s not often much in the way of blood—rigged her in a tight marine-surplus combat vest and jacket that covered the wounds, fitted heavy black EV lenses over her shocked open eyes. Then Sylvie got in through the team net and fired up her motor systems. I’d guess it took a little concentration, but nothing to the focus she’d have to have online when she deployed the team against the mimints on New Hok. She got Jad walking at her left shoulder, and we formed a phalanx around them. Simple commands to facial muscles clamped the dead deCom’s mouth shut, and the gray pallor—well, with the EV lenses on and a long gray sealwrap bag slung over one shoulder, Jad looked no worse than she should have done on a shiver comedown with added endorphin crash. I don’t suppose the rest of us looked too hot, either.
“Authorization, please.”
Sylvie handed over the sheaf of hardcopy, and the steward set about passing it through the reader one sheet at a time. She must have sent a tiny jolt through the net to the muscles in Jadwiga’s neck at the same time, because the dead woman tilted her head, a little stiffly, as if scanning the ’loader’s armored flank. Nice touch, very natural.
“Sylvie Oshima. Crew of five,” said the steward, looking up to count. “Hardware already stowed.”
“That’s right.”
“Cabin allocation.” He squinted at the reader’s screen. “Sorted. P-nineteen to -twenty-two, lower deck.”
There was a commotion back up near the top of the ramp. We all looked back, apart from Jadwiga. I spotted ocher robes and beards, angry gesticulating, and voices raised.
“What’s going on?” asked Sylvie casually.
“Oh—Beards.” The steward shuffled the scanned documentation back together. “They’ve been prowling up and down the waterfront all morning. Apparently they had a run-in last night with a couple of deComs someplace way east of here. You know how they are about that stuff.”
“Yeah. Fucking throwbacks.” Sylvie took the paperwork and stowed it in her jacket. “They got descriptions, or will any two deComs do?”
The steward smirked. “No vid, they say. Place was using up all its capacity on holoporn. But they got a witness description. A woman. And a man. Oh, yeah, and the woman had hair.”
“Christ, that could be
me,
” laughed Sylvie.
Orr gave her a strange look. Behind us, the clamor intensified. The steward shrugged.
“Yeah, could be any of a couple of dozen command heads I passed through here this morning. Hey, what I want to know is, what are a bunch of priests doing in a place runs holoporn anyway?”
“Jerking off?” suggested Orr.
“Religion,” said Sylvie, with a sudden click in her throat as if she were going to vomit. At my side, Jadwiga swayed unsteadily and twisted her head more abruptly than people generally do. “Has it occurred to anybody that—”
She grunted, gut deep. I shot a glance at Orr and Kiyoka, saw their faces go tight. The steward looked on, curious, not yet concerned.
“—that every human sacrament is a cheap evasion, that—”
Another choked sound. As if the words were being wrenched up out of somewhere buried in hard-packed silt. Jadwiga’s swaying worsened. Now the steward’s face began to change as he picked up the scent of distress. Even the deComs in the queue behind us were shifting their attention from the brawl at the top of the ramp, narrowing in on the pale woman and the speech that came sputtering up out of her.
“—that the
whole of human history
might just be some
fucking excuse
for the inability to provide
a decent female orgasm.
”
I trod on her foot, hard.
“Quite.”
The steward laughed nervously. Quellist sentiments, albeit early poetic ones, were still marked
HANDLE WITH CARE
in the Harlan’s World cultural canon. Too much danger that any enthusiasm for them might spill over into her later political theory and, of course, practice. You can name your hoverloaders for revolutionary heroes if you want, but they need to be far enough back in history that no one can remember what they were fighting for.
“I—” said Sylvie, puzzled. Orr moved to support her.
“Let’s have this argument later, Sylvie. We’d better get stowed first. Look.” He nudged her. “Jad’s
dead on her feet,
and I don’t feel much better. Can we—”
She caught it. Straightened and nodded.
“Yeah, later,” she said. Jadwiga’s corpse stopped swaying, even lifted the back of one hand realistically to its brow.
“Comedown blues,” I said, winking at the steward. His nervousness ironed out and he grinned.
“Been there, man.”
Jeering from the top of the ramp. I heard the shouted word
abomination,
then the sound of electrical discharge. Probably power knuckles.
“Think they’ve reeled in more than they can stow up there,” said the steward, peering past us. “Should have come heavy, they’re going to mouth off like that to a dock full of deCom. Okay, that’s us. You can go through.”
We made it through the hatch without further stumbling from anybody, and went down metal-echoing corridors in search of the cabins. At my back, Jad’s corpse kept mechanical pace. The rest of the team acted like nothing had happened.
• • •
“So what the fuck was that?”
I finally got around to asking the question about half an hour later. Sylvie’s crew stood around in her cabin, looking uncomfortable. Orr had to stoop below the reinforcing joists of the ceiling. Kiyoka stared out of the tiny one-way porthole, finding something of great interest in the water outside. Jadwiga lay facedown on a bunk. Still no sign of Lazlo.
“It was a glitch,” said Sylvie.
“A glitch.” I nodded. “Does this kind of glitch happen often?”
“No. Not often.”
“But it has happened before.”
Orr ducked under a joist to loom over me. “Why don’t you give it a rest, Micky. No one forced you to come along. You don’t like the terms, you can just fuck off, can’t you.”
“I’m just curious to know what we do if Sylvie drops out of the loop and starts spouting Quellisms in the middle of a mimint encounter, that’s all.”
“Let us worry about the mimints,” said Kiyoka tonelessly.
“Yeah, Micky.” Orr sneered. “It’s what we do for a living. You just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
“All I want to—”
“You shut the fuck up if you—”
“Look.” She said it very quietly, but Orr and Kiyoka both hooked around toward the sound of her voice. “Why don’t you two leave me and Micky alone to talk about this?”
“Ah, Sylvie, he’s just—”
“He’s got a right to know, Orr. Now, you want to give us some space?”
She watched them out, waited for the cabin door to fold, then went past me back to her seat.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Look.” It took me a moment to realize she meant it literally this time. She reached into the mass of her hair and lifted the center cord. “You know how this works. There’s more processing capacity in this than in most city databases. Has to be.”
She let the cord go and shook her hair across it. A small smile flickered around her mouth. “Out there, we can get a viral strike flung at us hard enough to scrape out a human mind like fruit pulp. Or just mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it, and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterward, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces.” She shivered a little. “Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.”
“Sounds like it’s time for some fresh hardware.”
“Yeah.” She grinned sourly. “I just don’t have that much loose change right now. Know what I mean?”
I did know. “Recent tech. It’s a fucker, huh?”
“Yeah. Recent tech, fucking indecent pricing. They take the Guild subsidies, the Protectorate defense funding, and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R and D to people like me.”
I shrugged. “Price of progress.”
“Yeah, saw the ad. Assholes. Look, what happened back there is just gunge in the works, nothing to worry about. Maybe something to do with trying to hotwire Jad. That’s something I don’t do usually, it’s unused capacity. And that’s usually where the data management systems dump any trace junk. Running Jad’s CNS must have flushed it out.”
“Do you remember what you were saying?”
“Not really.” She rubbed at the side of her face, pressed fingertips against one closed eye. “Something about religion? About the Beards?”
“Well, yeah. You lifted off from there, but then you started paraphrasing early Quellcrist Falconer. Not a Quellist, are you?”
“Fuck, no.”
“Didn’t think so.”
She thought about it for a while. Under our feet, the
Guns for Guevara
’s engines began to thrum gently. Departure for Drava, imminent.
“Could be something I caught off a dissemination drone. There’s still a lot of them out in the east—not worth the bounty to decommission, so they get left alone unless they’re fucking up local comlinks.”
“Would any of them be Quellist?”
“Oh yeah. At least four or five of the factions who fucked up New Hok were Quellist-inspired. Shit, from what I hear she was fighting up there herself back when the Unsettlement kicked off.”
“That’s what they say.”
The door chimed. Sylvie nodded at me, and I went to open it. Out in the faintly shuddering corridor stood a short, wiry figure with long black hair bound back in a ponytail. He was sweating heavily.
“Lazlo,” I guessed.
“Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”
“Long story. You want to talk to Sylvie?”
“That’d be nice.” The irony was ladled on. I stood aside and let him in. Sylvie gave him a weary top-to-toe look.
“Got in the life-raft launcher,” Lazlo announced. “Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-meter crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it.”
Sylvie sighed. “It’s not big, Las, it’s not clever, and someday you’ll miss the fucking boat. What are we going to do for a lead then?”
“Well, looks to me like you’re already lining up replacements.” A cocked glance in my direction. “Who is this, exactly?”
“Micky, Lazlo.” An idle gesture back and forth between us. “Lazlo, meet Micky Serendipity. Temporary traveling companion.”
“Did you get him aboard with my flashes?”
Sylvie shrugged. “You never use them.”
Lazlo spotted Jadwiga’s form on the bed, and a grin lit up his bony face. He strode across the cabin and slapped her on one buttock. When she didn’t respond, he frowned. I shut the door.
“Jesus, what did she take last night?”
“She’s dead, Las.”
“Dead?”
“For the moment, yes.” Sylvie looked across at me. “You’ve missed rather a lot of the dance since yesterday.”
Lazlo’s eyes followed Sylvie’s gaze across the cabin. “And it all has something to do with tall, dark, and synthetic there, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”
Lazlo went across to the basin niche and ran water into his cupped hands. He lowered his face into the water and snorted. Then he wiped the surplus water back through his hair, straightened up, and eyed me in the mirror. He turned pointedly toward Sylvie.
“All right, skipper. I’m listening.”