“You shut the fuck up if you—”
“Look.” She said it very quietly, but Orr and Kiyoka both hooked round towards 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 realise she meant it literally this time.
She reached into the mass of her hair and lifted the centre 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 afterwards, 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 defence funding and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R&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-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it.”
Sylvie sighed. “It’s not big, Las, it’s not clever and some day 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 travelling 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 towards Sylvie.
“Alright, skipper. I’m listening.”
SIX
It took a day and a night to get to Drava.
From about midway across the Andrassy Sea, Guns for Guevara ran throttled back, sensor net spread as wide as it would go, weapons systems at standby. The official line from the Mecsek government was that the mimints had all been designed for a land war and so had no way of getting off New Hok. On the ground, deCom crews reported seeing machines there were no descriptors for in the Military Machine Intelligence archive, which suggested at least some of the weaponry still prowling the continent had found ways to evolve beyond its original programme parameters. The whispered word was that experimental nanotech had run wild. The official line said nanotech systems were too crude and too poorly understood at the time of the Unsettlement to have been deployed as weapons. The whispered word was dismissed as anti-government scaremongering, the official line was derided in every place you could find intelligent conversation.
Without satellite cover or aerial support, there was no way to prove the thing either way. Myth and misinformation reigned.
Welcome to Harlan’s World.
“Hard to believe,” muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometres up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. “Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.”
Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armoured spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivvied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side.
Overhead, the sky was an unpromising grey in all directions.
Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. “Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.”
“Yeah, count me in,” said Kiyoka. “Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.”
It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analogue of the fifty metre bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars.
No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all human scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a
lance of angel fire.
Lazlo blew on his hands. “They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.”
“Oh, man, here we go again.” Kiyoka rolled her eyes.
“There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,” said Lazlo doggedly.
“Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—”
Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.
“—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches them when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens all the time, man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—”
“I did hear that one,” said Sylvie irritably. “Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.”
“Skipper, they said that, sure. They would say that.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Las, old son.” Orr dropped a heavy arm around the lead wincefish’s shoulders. “If it’d been angelfire, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. You know that. And you know damn well there’s a fucking hole in the coverage down around the equator big enough to drive a whole fleet of colony barges through if you do the math right. Now why don’t you give the conspiracy shit a rest and check out the scenery you dragged us all up here to see.”
It was an impressive enough sight. Drava, in its day, was both trade gateway and naval port for the whole New Hokkaido hinterland. The waterfront saw shipping from every major city on the planet and the sprawl of architecture behind the docks reached back a dozen kilometres into the foothills to provide homes for almost five million people. At the height of its commercial powers, Drava rivalled Millsport for wealth and sophistication, and the navy garrison was one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere.
Now we cruised past rows of smashed-in Settlement-Years warehouses, containers and cranes tumbled across the docks like children’s toys and merchant vessels sunk at anchor end to end. There were lurid chemical stains on the water around us, and the only living things in view were a miserable-looking clutch of ripwings flapping about on the canted, corrugated roof of a warehouse. One of them flung back its neck and uttered a clattering challenge as we went past, but you could tell its heart wasn’t in it.
“Want to watch out for those,” said Kiyoka grimly. “They don’t look like much but they’re smart. Most places on this coast they’ve already polished off the cormorants and the gulls, and they’ve been known to attack humans too.”
I shrugged. “Well, it’s their planet.”
The deCom beachhead fortifications came into view. Hundreds of metres of razor-edged livewire crawling restlessly about inside its patrol parameters, jagged rows of crouched spider blocks on the ground and robot sentries perched brooding on the surrounding rooftops. In the water, a couple of automated minisubs poked conning towers above the surface, bracketing the curve of the estuary. Surveillance kites flew at intervals, tethered to crane stacks and a communications mast in the heart of the beachhead.
Guns for Guevara cut power and drifted in broadside between the two subs. On the dockside, a few figures paused in what they were doing and voices floated across the closing gap to the new arrivals. Most of the work was done by machines, silently. Beachhead security interrogated the hoverloader’s navigational intelligence and gave clearance. The auto grapple system talked to the sockets on the dock, agreed trajectory and fired home. Cables cranked tight and pulled the vessel in. An articulated boarding corridor flexed itself awake and nuzzled up to the dockside loading hatch. Buoyancy antigrav kicked over to mooring levels with a shiver. Doors unlatched.
“Time to go,” said Lazlo, and disappeared below like a rat down a hole.
Orr made an obscene gesture in his wake.
“What you bring us up here in the first place for, you’re in such a fucking hurry to get off?”
An indistinct answer floated back up. Feet clattered on the companionway.
“Ah, let him go,” said Kiyoka. “No one rolls ‘til we talk to Kurumaya anyway. There’ll be a queue around the ‘fab.”
Orr looked at Sylvie. “What are we going to do about Jad?”
“Leave her here.” The command head was gazing out at the ugly grey bubblefab settlement with a curiously rapt expression on her face. Hard to believe it was the view—maybe she was listening to the machine systems talk, senses open and lost in the wash of transmission traffic. She snapped out of it abruptly and turned to face her crew. “We’ve got the cabins ‘til noon. No point in moving her until we know what we’re doing.”
“And the hardware?”
Sylvie shrugged. “Same applies. I’m not carting that lot around Drava all day while we wait for Kurumaya to give us a slot.”
“Think he’ll ramp us again?”
“After last time? Somehow I doubt it.”
Below deck, the narrow corridors were plugged up with jostling deComs, carry-on gear slung across shoulders or portered on heads.
Cabin doors stood folded open, occupants within rationalising baggage prior to launching themselves into the crush. Boisterous shouts ricocheted back and forth over heads and angled cases. Motion was sludgily forward and port, towards the debarkation hatch. We threaded ourselves into the crowd and crept along with it, Orr in the lead. I hung back, protecting my wounded ribs as much as I could. Occasional jolts got through. I rode it with gritted teeth.
What seemed like a long time later, we spilled out the end of the debarkation corridor and stood amidst the bubblefabs. The deCom swarm drifted ahead of us, through the ‘fabs and towards the centre mast.
Part way there, Lazlo sat waiting for us on a gutted plastic packing crate.
He was grinning.
“What kept you?”
Orr feinted at him with a growl. Sylvie sighed.
“At least tell me you got a queue chip.”
Lazlo opened his hand with the solemnity of a conjuror and presented a little fragment of black crystal on his palm. The number fifty-seven resolved itself from a blurred point of light inside. A string of muttered curses smoked off Sylvie and her companions at the sight.
“Yeah, it’ll be a while.” Lazlo shrugged. “Leftovers from yesterday. They’re still assigning the backlog. I heard something serious went down inside the Cleared Zone last night. We may as well eat.”
He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap moulded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out towards us, pungent enough to trigger even the meagre taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.
“Misos and rice all round?” asked Lazlo.
Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.
“Hey. On me, this.”
“Thanks.”
“No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.”
“Well, there was a lot going on.”
“Yeah. You want anything else?”
There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own and tossed it onto the counter.
“So you got tagged.”
“Yeah. Ribs.”
<
br /> “Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?”
“No. Before that.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Busy man.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” I tore dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.
The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering.
Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-Years jazz.
Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place—old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-Years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualised. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.
“This is old,” I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.
Lazlo grunted. “Welcome to New Hok.”
Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.
“You like this stuff, huh?” Kiyoka asked me through a mouthful of rice.
“Stuff like it. I don’t recognise—”
“Dizzy Csango and Great Laughing Mushroom,” said Orr unexpectedly. “Down the Ecliptic. But it’s a cover of a Blackman Taku float, originally. Taku never would have let the violin in the front door.”
I shot the giant a strange look.
“Don’t listen to him.” Sylvie told me, scratching idly under her hair.
“You go back to early Taku and Ide stuff, they’ve got that gypsy twang scribbled all over the place. They only phased it out for the Millsport sessions.”
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