I don’t want to look her in the face to find out which.
In the bowels of the steadily thrumming Daikoku Dawn, we levered ourselves up from the crawlspace into a corridor and made our dripping way to S3 7. As promised, the door flexed open at a push. Inside, lights sprang up in an unexpectedly luxurious space. I’d subconsciously been preparing myself for something along the lines of the spartan two-bunk accommodation we’d had on the Guns for Guevara, but Oishii had done us proud. The cabin was a well-appointed comfort class with an autoform bed space that could be programmed to swell up as twin singles or a broad double. The fixtures snowed wear but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.
“Very nice,” I chattered as I closed the door on lock. “Well done, Oishii. I approve.”
En-suite facilities were almost the size of another single cabin themselves, complete with airblast drier in the shower cabinet. We peeled naked and dumped our soaked clothing, then took turns rinsing the chill out of our bones first under a pummelling hail of hot water, then in a gently buffeting storm of warm air. It took a while, one at a time, but there was no hint of invitation in Sylvie’s face as she stepped into the cabinet and so I stayed outside rubbing at my chilled flesh. At one point, watching her as she turned with water streaming down over her breasts and belly, trickling between her legs and tugging at a tiny tuft of drenched pubic hair, I felt myself beginning to harden. I moved quickly to pick up the jacket from my stealth suit and sat awkwardly with it covering my erection.
The woman in the shower caught the movement and looked at me curiously, but she said nothing. No reason why she should. Last time I’d seen Nadia Makita, she’d been slipping into a post-coital drowse in a bubblefab out on the New Hok plains. Small, confident smile on her lips, one arm wrapped loosely around my thigh. When I finally pulled loose, she only turned over in the sleeping bag and muttered to herself.
She hadn’t been back since.
And meanwhile you dressed and tidied up before the others got back, like a criminal trying to cover his tracks.
Met Orr’s suspicious gaze with even Envoy deceit.
Slipped away with Lazlo to your own ‘fab, to lie awake until dawn, disbelieving what you’d seen and heard and done.
Finally, Sylvie stepped out of the cabinet airblasted all but dry. With an effort I stopped myself staring at the suddenly sexualised landscape of her body and went to change places with her. She said nothing, just touched me on one shoulder with a loosely curled fist and frowned. Then she disappeared into the cabin next door.
I stayed under the shower for nearly an hour, turning back and forth in water just below scalding, masturbating vaguely and trying not to think too much about what I was going to have to do when we got to Tekitomura.
The Daikoku Dawn throbbed around me as she ploughed southward.
When I got out of the shower, I dumped our soaked clothing in the cabinet and left the airblast on full, then wandered through to the cabin.
Sylvie was sleeping soundly beneath the coverlet of a bedspace she’d programmed to mould as a double.
I stood and watched her sleep for a long time. Her mouth was open and her hair was in chaotic disarray around her face. The ebony central cord had twisted so that it lay phallically across one cheek. Imagery I didn’t need. I smoothed it back with the rest of the hair until her face was clear.
She muttered in her sleep and moved the same loosely curled fist she’d punched me with up to touch her mouth. I stood and watched her some more.
She’s not.
I know she’s not. It’s not possi—
What, just like it’s not possible there’s another Takeshi Kovacs out there hunting you? Where’s your sense of wonder, Tak?
I stood and watched.
And in the end I shrugged irritably and climbed into the bedspace beside her, and tried to sleep.
It took a while.
FOURTEEN
The crossing back to Tekitomura was far faster than our trip out had been with the Guns for Guevara. Flogging steadily through the icy sea away from the New Hok coast, the Daikoku Dawn was constrained by none of the caution her sister ship had shown going in, and ran at full speed for the bulk of the voyage. According to Sylvie, we raised Tekitomura on the horizon not long after the sun came up and woke her through windows we’d forgotten to blank. Less than an hour after that we were crowding the ramps at Kompcho.
I woke to a sunlit cabin, stilled engines and Sylvie, dressed and staring at me over arms folded across the backrest of a chair she’d straddled beside the bedspace. I blinked at her.
“What?”
“What the fuck were you doing last night?”
I propped myself upright beneath the covers and yawned. “You want to expand on that a little? Give me some idea what you’re talking about?”
“What I’m talking about,” she snapped, “is waking up with your dick jammed against my spine like a racking shard blaster barrel.”
“Ah.” I rubbed at one eye. “Sorry.”
“Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?”
I shrugged. “Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?”
“Oh.” She looked away. “I don’t remember doing that.”
“Well you did.” I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was.
I nodded at what she was wearing. “Clothes are dry, I see.”
“Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.” Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, “I’ll get yours for you.”
We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed.
We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.
“We’d better get you covered up,” I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. “No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.”
She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. “I thought the idea was to leave traces.”
“Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.”
“Alright.”
The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct—a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.
“How may I help you?”
“I have vital information for you,” I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. “I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hover loader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.”
The construct smiled again. “That’s impossible, sir.”
“Yeah? Then go check out cabin S37.” I cut the call, turned off the terminal and nodded at Sylvie, who was struggling to get the last of her riotous hair stuffed inside the curtain-cloth headscarf.
“Very becoming. We’ll make a god-fearing maiden of modest demeanour out o
f you yet.”
“Fuck off.” The natural spring in the command head mane was still pushing the edges of the scarf forward and out. She attempted to smear the cloth backward, out of the way of her peripheral vision. “You think they’ll come here?”
“Eventually. But they’ve got to check the cabin, which they’ll be in no hurry to do, crank call like that. Then check back with Drava, then trace the call. It’ll be the rest of the day, maybe longer.”
“So we’re safe leaving this place untorched?”
I glanced around at the shabby little room. “Sniffer squad won’t get much off what we’ve touched that isn’t blurred with the last dozen occupants. Maybe just enough to confirm against the cabin traces. Not worth worrying about. Anyway, I’m short on incendiaries right now. You?”
She nodded at the door. “Get them anywhere on Kompcho wharf for a couple of hundred a crate.”
“Tempting. Bit rough on the other guests, though.”
A shrug. I grinned.
“Man, wearing that thing’s really pissing you off, isn’t it. Come on, we’ll break the trail somewhere else. Let’s get out of here.”
We went down canted plastic stairs, found a side exit and slipped into the street without checking out. Back into the pulsing flow of deCom commerce and stroll. Groups of sprogs clowning around on corners for attention, crew packs ambling along in the subtly integrated fashion I’d started to notice at Drava. Men, women and machines carrying hardware. Command heads. Dealers of knocked-off chemicals and small novelty devices working from laid-out plastic sheets that shimmered in the sun. The odd religious maniac declaiming to passing jeers. Street entertainers aping the local trends for laughs, running cheap holo storytell and cheaper puppet shows, collection trays out for the sparse shower of near-exhausted credit chips and the hope that not too many spectators would fling the totally exhausted variety. We cut back and forth in it for a while, surveillance evasion habit on my part and a vague interest in some of the acts.
“—the blood curdling story of Mad Ludmila and the Patchwork Man—”
“—hardcore footage from the deCom clinics! See the latest in surgery and body testing to the limits, ladies and gentlemen, to the very limits—”
“—the taking of Drava by heroic deCom teams in full colour—”
“—God—”
“—pirated full sense repro. One hundred per cent guaranteed genuine! Josefina Hikari, Mitzi Harlan, Ito Marriott and many more. Get wet with the most beautiful First Family bodies in surroundings that—”
“—deCom souvenirs. Karakuri fragments—”
On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium.
Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.
Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.
“Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.”
The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.
“See anything you like?”
“Not really, no.” I went up to the counter. “I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.”
“Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.” The woman winked. “Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.”
She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.
She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.
“Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says—see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.” She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. “Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.”
“I said something I could wear.”
“So you did. So you did. Well, Ronin don’t make much smaller than the 86 in the monomol range. You want a slug gun maybe?”
“No, the shredder’s good, but it’s got to be smaller than that. What else have you got?”
The woman sucked at her upper lip. It made her look like a crone.
“Well, there are some of the Old Home brands as well—H&K, Kalashnikov, General Systems. It’s mostly pre-owned, see. Sprog trade-ins for mimint smasher gear. Look. Do you a GS Rapsodia. Scan resistant and very slim, straps flat under clothing but the butt’s automould. Reacts to body heat, swells to fit your grip. How’s that?”
“What’s it ranged at?”
“Depends on dispersal. Tightened up I’d say you could take down a target at forty, fifty metres if your hands don’t shake. On widespread, you don’t get much range at all, but it’ll clean out a room for you.”
I nodded. “How much?”
“Oh, we can come to some arrangement on that.” The woman winked clumsily. “Is your friend buying too?”
Sylvie was on the other side of the emporium, a half dozen metres away.
She heard and glanced across at the datacoil.
“Yeah, I’ll take that Szeged squeeze gun you’re listing there. Is that all the ammunition you’ve got for it?”
“Ah … yes.” The older woman blinked at her, then back at the display.
“But it’ll take a Ronin SPo load too, they made them compatible. I can throw in two or three clips if you—”
“Do that.” Sylvie met my eyes with something in her face I couldn’t read.
“I’ll wait outside.”
“Good idea.”
No one spoke again until Sylvie had brushed through the shell curtains and out. We both stared after her for a couple of moments.
“Knows her datacode,” chirped the woman finally.
I looked at the lined face and wondered if there was anything behind the words. As a blatant demonstration of the deCom power her head had been scarfed to disguise, Sylvie reading detail off the datacoil at distance pretty much screamed for attention. But it wasn’t clear what capacity this other woman’s mind was running on, or if she cared about anything much beyond a quick sale. Or if she’d even remember us in a couple of hours time.
“It’s a trick,” I said weakly. “Shall we, um, talk about price?”
Out in the street, I found Sylvie stood at the edges of a crowd that had gathered in front of a holoshow storyteller. He was an old man, but his hands were nimble on the display controls and a synth-system taped to his throat modulated his voice to fit the different characters of his tale. The holo was a pale orb full of indistinct shapes at his feet. I heard the name Quell as I tugged at Sylvie’
s arm.
“Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?”
“Ssh, shut up. Listen.”
“Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—”
“And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,” I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.
“Sssh.”
“—so she squinted and squinted but, well.” The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. “Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—”
A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.
“You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.”
The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.
“And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.
“But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman, and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.”
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