Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.
“Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a god to you. Is that clear?”
Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.
“Mistress Oshima. If you’d like to follow me, please.”
She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and followed him out of the cabin. The yakuza filed after them, leaving their captain and the man on the floor. The captain stared at his injured enforcer for a moment, then booted him savagely in the ribs, spat on him and stalked out.
Outside, they’d loaded the three men I’d killed in the eyrie onto a fold down grav stretcher rack. The yakuza captain detailed a man to drive it, then took point ahead of a protective phalanx around Kovacs and Sylvie.
Beside and behind the stretcher rack, Anton and the four remaining members of the Skull Gang formed up into a lax rearguard. Dig’s outdoor microcams followed the little procession out of sight along the path down to Tekitomura.
Stumbling fifty metres behind them all, still nursing his ruined and as yet untreated hand, came the disgraced enforcer who had dared to touch Sylvie Oshima.
I watched him go, trying to make sense of it.
Trying to make it fit.
I was still trying when Dig 301 asked if I was finished, if wanted to see something else. I told her no, absently. In my head, Envoy intuition was already doing what needed to be done.
Setting fire to my preconceptions and burning them to the ground.
NINETEEN
The lights were all out in Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six when I got there, but in a unit half a dozen bays down on the right, the upper level windows glowed fitfully, as if the place was on fire inside. There was a frenetic hybrid Reef Dive/Neojunk rhythm blasting out into the night, even through the cranked down loading bay shutter, and three thickset figures stood around outside in dark coats, breathing steam and flapping their arms against the cold. Plex Kohei might have the floorspace to throw big dance parties, but it didn’t look as if he could afford machine security on the door. This was going to be easier than I’d expected.
Always assuming Plex was actually there.
Are you kidding me? Isa’s fifteen-year-old Millsport-accented scorn down the line when I phoned her late that afternoon. Of course he’ll be in. What day is it?
Uh. I estimated. Friday?
Right, Friday. So what do the local yokels do up there on a Friday?
Fuck should I know, Isa? And don’t be such a metrosnob.
Uh, Friday? Hello? Fishing community? Ebisu night?
He’s having a party.
He’s cranking some credit out of cheap floorspace and good take connections, is what he’s doing, she drawled. All those warehouses. All those family friends in the yak.
Don’t suppose you’d know which warehouse exactly.
Stupid question. Picking my way through the fractal street-planning of the warehouse district hadn’t been my idea of fun, but once I hit Belacotton Kohei section, it hadn’t been hard to find my way to the party—you could hear the music across half a dozen alleys in every direction.
Don’t suppose I would. Isa yawned down the line. I guessed she’d not been out of bed that long. Say, Kovacs. You been pissing people off up there?
No. Why?
Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t really be telling you this for nothing. But seeing as how we go back.
I stifled a grin. Isa and I went back all of a year and a half. When you’re fifteen I guess that’s a long time.
Yeah?
Yeah, been a lot of big heat down here, asking after you. Paying big for answers, too. So if you’re not already, I’d start looking over the shoulder of that deep-voiced new sleeve you’ve got yourself there.
I frowned and thought about it. What kind of big heat?
If I knew that, you’d have to pay me for it. But as it happens, I don’t. Only players talked to me were bent Millsport PD, and them you can buy for the price of an Angel Wharf blowjob. Anybody could have sent them.
And I don’t suppose you told them anything about me.
Don’t suppose I did. You planning on soaking up this line much longer, Kovacs?
Only, I’m not like you. I have a social life.
No, I’m gone. Thanks for the newsflash, Isa.
She grunted. My clit-tingling pleasure. You stay in one piece, maybe we get to do some more business I can charge you for.
I pressed the sealseam of my newly acquired coat closed to the collar, flexed my hands inside the black polalloy gloves—spike of brief agony from the left—and poured gangster attitude into my stride as I came round the curve of the alley. Think Yukio Hirayasu at his most youthfully arrogant. Ignore the fact the coat wasn’t hand-tailored—straight-to-street off-the-rack branded was the best I could do at short notice, a garment the real Hirayasu wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But it was a rich matt black to match the spray-on gloves and, in this light, it should pass. Envoy deceit would do the rest.
I’d thought briefly about crashing Plex’s party the hard way. Going in heavy against the door, or maybe scaling the back of the warehouse and cracking a skylight entry. But my left arm was still a single throbbing ache from fingertip to neck and I didn’t know how far I could trust it to do what I wanted in a critical situation.
The door detail saw me coming and drew together. Neurachem vision calibrated them for me at distance—cheap, wharf-front muscle, maybe some very basic combat augmentation in the way they moved. One of them had a tactical marine tattoo across his cheek, but that could have been a knock-off, courtesy of some parlour with army surplus software.
Or, like a lot of tacs, he could just have fallen on post-demob hard times.
Downsizing. The universal catch-all and catechism on Harlan’s World these days. Nothing was more sacred than cost cutting, and even the military weren’t entirely safe.
“Hold it, sam.”
It was the one with the tattoo. I cut him a withering glance. Halted, barely.
“I have an appointment with Plex Kohei. I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”
“Appointment?” His gaze lifted and slipped left, checking a retinal guest list. “Not tonight you don’t. Man’s busy.”
I let my eyes widen, built the volcanic pressure of fury the way I’d seen it from the yak captain in Dig 301’s footage.
“Do you know who I am?” I barked.
The tattooed doorman shrugged. “I know I don’t see your face on this list. And round here, that means you don’t get in.”
At my side, the others were looking me up and down with professional interest. Seeing what they could break easily. I fought down the impulse to take up a fighting stance and eyed them with mannered disdain instead.
Launched the bluff.
“Very well. You will please inform your employer that you have turned Yukio Hirayasu from his door, and that thanks to your diligence in this matter, he will now speak to me in sempai Tanaseda’s presence tomorrow morning, unadvised and thus unprepared.”
Gazes flew back and forth between the three of them. It was the names, the whiff of authentic yakuza clout. The spokesman hesitated. I turned away. Was only midway through the motion when he made up his mind, and broke.
“Alright. Hirayasu-san. Just one moment please.”
The great thing about organised crime is the level of fear it likes to maintain among its minions and those who associate with them. Thug hierarchy. You can see the same pattern on any of a dozen different worlds—the Hun Home triads, Adoracion’s familias vigilantes, the Provo Crews on Nkrumah’s Land. Regional variations, but they all sow the sa
me crop of respect through terror of retribution. And all reap the same harvest of stunted initiative in the ranks. No one wants to take an independent decision, when independent action runs the risk of reinterpretation as a lack of respect. Shit like that can get you Really Dead.
Better by far, to fall back on hierarchy. The doorman dug out his phone and punched up his boss.
“Listen, Plex, we’ve—”
He listened a moment himself, face immobile. Angry insect sounds from the phone. I didn’t need neurachem to work out what was being said.
“Uh, yeah, I know you said that, man. But I’ve got Yukio Hirayasu out here wanting a word, and I—”
Another break, but this time the doorkeep seemed happier. He nodded a couple of times, described me and what I’d just said. At the other end of the line, I could hear Plex dithering. I gave it a couple of moments, then snapped my fingers impatiently and gestured for the phone. The doorman caved in and handed it over. I mustered Hirayasu’s speech patterns from memory a couple of months old, coloured in what I didn’t know with standard Millsport gangster idiom.
“Plex.” Grim impatience.
“Uh. Yukio? That really you?”
I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. “No, I’m a fucking ledgedust dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.”
“Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were gone.”
“Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”
“Tana—” Plex swallowed audibly. “Is Tanaseda here?”
“Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.”
“All over what?”
“All over what?”
I cranked the yelp again. “What do you fucking think?”
I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.
“I thought they—”
“Are you going to fucking let me in or what?”
The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.
Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene—translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.
A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood warm. The music got even louder.
We forged through the tightly packed dancespace without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissed-out vacant. The take scene is pretty laid back wherever you go on Harlan’s World—careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amidst incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody wants them outside of the military.
A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirror wood panelling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.
I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automould bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful, wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had got them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dancespace image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognisable enough to dance to.
Or whatever.
“Hey Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.” Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. “That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom grown?”
I nodded at his playmates. “Get rid of them.”
“Uh, sure.” He turned back to the automould and clapped his hands.
“Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.”
They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.
“Yeah, him too.”
The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at
Plex, who was moving towards a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the side wall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous, take and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.
“Uh, you want a pipe, man?”
“Plex.” I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. “Just what the fuck is going on?”
He flinched. Stuttered.
“I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—”
“Fuck that, Plex. Talk to me.”
“Look, man, it’s not my fault.” His tone worked towards aggrieved. “Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that kaikyo shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I know bio tech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was fucked up.”
My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio. Kaikyo—a strait, a stolen goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.
“Where’d they take her?” I asked quietly.
It wasn’t Yukio’s tone any more but I wasn’t going to get much further as Yukio anyway. I didn’t know enough to sustain the lie in the face of Plex’s lifelong acquaintance.
“Took her to Millsport, I guess.” He was building himself
a pipe, maybe to balance out the take blur. “I mean, Yukio, has Tanaseda really not—”
“Where in Millsport?”
Then he got it. I saw the knowledge soak through him, and he reached suddenly under the module’s upper shelf. Maybe he had some neurachem wiring somewhere in that pale, aristocratic body he wore, but for him it would have been little more than an accessory. And the chemicals slowed him down so much it was laughable.
I let him get a hand on the gun, let him get it halfway clear of the shelf it was webbed under. Then I kicked his hand away, knocked him back onto the automould with a backfist and stamped down on the shelf. Ornate glassware splintered, the paper parcels flew and the shelf cracked across.
The gun fell out on the floor. Looked like a compact shard blaster, big brother to the GS Rapsodia under my coat. I scooped it up and turned in time to catch Plex scrambling for some kind of wall alarm.
“Don’t.”
He froze, staring hypnotised at the gun.
“Sit down. Over there.”
He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.
Fucking set fire to it or something.
“Who.” His mouth worked. “Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.”
I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.
“Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.”
His face creased. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.
“Fuck. Kovacs?”
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