I looked at him. “Yes. I know.”
“And, well, you know. It’s only six hours.”
“And all of tomorrow until the ‘loader ships out.” I hooked my glass. “I really think you’d better just shut up, Plex.”
He did. After a couple of brooding minutes, I discovered I didn’t want that either. I was jumpy in my synthetic skin, twitching like a meth comedown, uncomfortable with who I physically was. I needed distraction.
“You know Yukio long?”
He looked up, sulkily. “I thought you wanted—”
“Yeah. Sorry. I got shot tonight, and it hasn’t put me in a great mood. I was just—”
“You were shot?”
“Plex.” I leaned intently across the table. “Do you want to keep your fucking voice down.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I mean.” I gestured helplessly. “How the fuck do you stay in business, man? You’re supposed to be a criminal, for Christ’s sake.”
“It wasn’t my choice,” he said stiffly.
“No? How’s that work, then? They got some kind of conscription for it up here?”
“Very funny. I suppose you chose the military, did you? At seventeen fucking standard years old?”
I shrugged. “I made a choice, yeah. Military or the gangs. I put on a uniform. It paid better than the criminal stuff I was already doing.”
“Well, I was never in a gang.” He knocked back a chunk of his drink.
“The yakuza made sure of that. Too much danger of corrupting their investment. I went to the right tutors, spent time in the right social circles, learnt to walk the walk, talk the talk, and then they plucked me like a fucking cherry.”
His gaze beached on the scarred wood of the table top.
“I remember my father,” he said bitterly. “The day I got access to the family datastacks. Right after my coming-of-age party, the next morning. I was still hungover, still fried and Tanaseda and Kadar and Hirayasu in his office like fucking vampires. He cried that day.”
“That Hirayasu?”
He shook his head. “That’s the son. Yukio. You want to know how long I’ve known Yukio? We grew up together. Fell asleep together in the same Kanji classes, got wrecked on the same take, dated the same girls. He left for Millsport about the time I started my dh/biotech practicals, came back a year later wearing that fucking stupid suit.” He looked up. “You think I like living out my father’s debts?”
It didn’t seem to need an answer. And I didn’t want to listen to any more of this stuff. I sipped some more of the cask-strength whisky, wondering what the bite would be like in a sleeve with real taste buds. I gestured with the glass. “So how come they needed your de-and-re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting-set in town, surely.”
He shrugged. “Some-kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.”
“Organised crime, huh.”
There was a resentful envy in the way he stared at me. “You don’t have any family, do you?”
“Not so’s you’d notice.” That was a little harsh, but he didn’t need to know the close truth. Feed him something else. “I’ve been away.”
“In the store?”
I shook my head. “Offworld.”
“Offworld? Where’d you go?” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, barely held back by the ghost of breeding. The Glimmer system has no habitable planets apart from Harlan’s World. Tentative terraforming down the plane of the ecliptic on Glimmer V won’t yield useful results for another century. Offworld for a Harlanite means a stellar-range needle cast, shrugging off your physical self and re-sleeving somewhere light years distant under an alien sun. It’s all very romantic and in the public consciousness known needlecast riders are accorded a celebrity status somewhat akin to pilots back on earth during the days of intra-system spaceflight.
The fact that, unlike pilots, these latter-day celebrities don’t actually have to do anything to travel the hypercaster, the fact that in many cases they have no actual skills or stature other than their hypercast fame itself, doesn’t seem to impede their triumphant conquest of the public imagination.
Old Earth is the real jackpot destination, of course, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go, so long as you come back. It’s a favourite boost technique for fading experia stars and out-of-favour Millsport courtesans. If you can just somehow scrape up the cost of the ‘cast, you’re more or less guaranteed years of well-paid coverage in the skullwalk magazines.
That, of course, doesn’t apply to Envoys. We just used to go silently, crush the odd planetary uprising, topple the odd regime, and then plug in something UN-compliant that worked. Slaughter and suppression across the stars, for the greater good—naturally—of a unified Protectorate.
I don’t do that any more.
“Did you go to Earth?”
“Among other places.” I smiled at a memory that was getting on for a century out of date. “Earth’s a shit-hole, Plex. Static fucking society, hyper-rich immortal overclass, cowed masses.”
He shrugged and poked morosely at the sushi with his chopsticks.
“Sounds just like this place.”
“Yeah.” I sipped some more whisky. There were a lot of subtle differences between Harlan’s World and what I’d seen on Earth, but I couldn’t be bothered to lay them out right now. “Now you come to mention it.”
“So what are you. Oh, fuck!”
For a moment I thought he was just fumbling the bottleback sushi.
Shaky feedback on the holed synth sleeve, or maybe just shaky close-to dawn weariness on me. It took me whole seconds to look up, track his gaze to the bar and the door, make sense of what was there.
The woman seemed unremarkable at first glance—slim and competent looking, in grey coveralls and a nondescript padded jacket, unexpectedly long hair, face pale to washed-out. A little too sharp-edged for sweeper crew, maybe. Then you noticed the way she stood, booted feet set slightly apart, hands pressed flat to the mirrorwood bar, face tipped forward, body preternaturally immobile. Then your eyes went back to that hair and—
Framed in the doorway not five metres off her flank, a group of senior caste New Revelation priests stood frigidly surveying the clientele. They must have spotted the woman about the same time I spotted them.
“Oh, shit fuck!”
“Plex, shut up.” I murmured it through closed teeth and stilled lips. “They don’t know my face.”
“But she’s—”
“Just. Wait.”
The spiritual well-being gang advanced into the room. Nine of them, all told. Cartoon patriarch beards and close shaven skulls, grim-faced and intent. Three officiators, the colours of the evangelical elect draped blackly across their dull ochre robes and the bioware scopes worn like an ancient pirate patch across one eye. They were locked in on the woman at the bar, bending her way like gulls on a downdraft. Across the room, her uncovered hair must have been a beacon of provocation.
Whether they were out combing the streets for me was immaterial. I’d gone masked into the citadel, synth-sleeved. I had no signature.
But rampant across the Saffron Archipelago, dripping down onto the northern reaches of the next landmass like venom from a ruptured web jelly and now, they told me, taking root in odd little pockets as far south as Millsport itself, the Knights of the New Revelation brandished their freshly regenerated gynophobia with an enthusiasm of which their Earthbound Islamo-Christian ancestors would have been proud. A woman alone in a bar was bad enough, a woman uncovered far worse, but this—
“Plex,” I said quietly. “On second thoughts, I think you’d maybe better get out of here.”
“Tak, listen—”
I dialled the hallucinogen grenade up to maximum delay, fused it and let it roll gently away under the table. Plex heard it go and he made a tiny yelping noise.
“Go on,” I said.
The lead officiator reached the bar. He sto
od half a metre away from the woman, maybe waiting for her to cringe.
She ignored him. Ignored, for that matter, everything further off than the bar surface under her hands and, it dawned on me, the face she could see reflected there.
I eased unhurriedly to my feet.
“Tak, it isn’t worth it, man. You don’t know wha—”
“I said go, Plex.” Drifting into it now, into the gathering fury like an abandoned skiff on the edge of the maelstrom. “You don’t want to play this screen.”
The officiator got tired of being ignored.
“Woman,” he barked. “You will cover yourself.”
“Why,” she enunciated back with bitten clarity, “don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.”
There was an almost comical pause. The nearest barflies jerked around on a collective look that gaped did she really say—
Somewhere, someone guffawed.
The blow was already swinging in. A gnarled, loose-fingered backhander that by rights should have catapulted the woman off the bar and onto the floor in a little heap. Instead—
The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funnelling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.
A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.
Mistake.
She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.
I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.
Sarah.
A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.
Sarah—
“It’s him!”
Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.
“It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!”
With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.
Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean—Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.
Best to play it safe.
The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.
Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-grenade. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere
I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar.
Her face looked bruised.
I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.
“Can you stand?”
A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.
“Out. Try not to breathe.”
Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando.
Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.
“A light,” he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.”
He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.
“The angel.”
I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”
“The an—” And then something must have got through the hallucinogens.
His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.”
“Now you’ve got it.”
The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.
I slashed his face open and left.
Deep enough.
Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.
The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.
Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.
The paving …
Move. Breathe. Get out of here.
A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid towards me, jewelled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss/clank of autograpples firing home into their shore side sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.
Get a grip, Tak. It’s just the chemicals.
Across the wharf, under a stilled robot crane, stray light glinted off her hair as she turned. I checked once more over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but the entrance to the bar was firmly closed. Faint noises leaked through at the lower limits of my c
heap synth hearing. Could have been laughter, weeping, pretty much anything. H-grenades are harmless enough long-term, but while they last you do tend to lose interest in rational thought or action. I doubted anyone’d work out where the door was for the next half hour, let alone how to get through it.
The sweeper bumped up to the wharf, cranked tight by the autograpple cables. Figures leapt ashore, trading banter. I crossed unnoticed to the shadow of the crane. Her face floated ghost-like in the gloom. Pale, wolfish beauty. The hair that framed it seemed to crackle with half-seen energies.
“Pretty handy with that knife.”
I shrugged. “Practice.”
She looked me over. “Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Well, you sure—” Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. “Shit, they got you.”
I shook my head. “Different party. Happened a while back.”
“Yeah? Looks to me like you could use a medic. I’ve got some friends could—”
“It isn’t worth it. I’m getting out of this in a couple of hours.”
Brows cranked. “Re-sleeve? Well, okay, you got better friends than mine. Making it pretty hard for me to pay off my giri here.”
“Skip it. On the house.”
“On the house?” She did something with her eyes that I liked. “What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”
“No? Comeback flic, ‘bout ten years back.”
“Missed it. I’ve been away.”
Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party.
Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.
“They’re putting out a call,” she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. “I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.”
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