“And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?”
“Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.” I went on looking into the maelstrom. “During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.”
“I see.” His voice showed no reaction. “Did it work?”
“Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.”
“Yes. And the fire?”
I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. “Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.”
He waded across and looked.
“Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.”
“They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.”
The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.
“Then will he not know to come here?” Koi asked softly. “To Vchira?”
“I don’t think so.” I reran my own second-guessing rationale as I boarded the Haiduci’s Daughter in Tekitomura, hoping it sounded as convincing out loud. “He’s too young to know anything about my time with the Bugs, and there’s no official record they can feed him. Vidaura he knows, but for him she’s still a trainer back in the Corps. He’ll have no feel for what she might be doing now, or any post-service connection we might have. This Aiura bitch will give him what they’ve got on me, maybe on Virginia too. But they don’t have much and what they do have is misleading. We’re Envoys, we both covered our tracks and sewed the dataflows with tinsel every move we made.”
“Very thorough of you.”
I searched the lined face for irony, and found none apparent. I shrugged.
“It’s the conditioning. We’re trained to disappear without trace on worlds we hardly know. Doing it somewhere you grew up is child’s play. All these motherfuckers have got to work with is underworld rumour and a series of sentences in storage. That’s not much to go on with a whole globe to cover and no aerial capacity. And the one thing he probably thinks he knows about me is that I’ll avoid Newpest like the plague.”
I shut down the updraft of family feeling that had stabbed through me on the Haiduci’s Daughter. Let go a compressed breath.
“So where will he look for you?”
I nodded at the model of Millsport in front of us, brooding on the densely settled islands and platforms. “I think he’s probably looking for me right there. It’s where I always came when I wasn’t offworld. It’s the biggest urban environment on the planet, the easiest place to disappear if you know it well, and it’s right across the bay from Rila. If I were an Envoy, that’s where I’d be. Hidden, and in easy striking distance.”
For a moment, my unaccustomed aerial viewpoint grew dizzying as I looked down on the wharflines and streets, unfocused memory down the disjointed centuries blurring the old and new into a smudged familiarity.
And he’s down there somewhere.
Come on, there’s no way you can be sure of—
He’s down there somewhere like an antibody, perfectly shaped to match the intruder he’s looking for, asking soft questions in the flow of city life, bribing, threatening, levering, breaking, all the things that they taught us both so well.
He’s breathing deep as he does it, living it for its own dark and joyous sake like some inverted version of Jack Soul Brasil’s philosophy of life.
Plex’s words came trickling back to me.
He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—
I thought back along my train of associations in the last year, the people I might have endangered.
Todor Murakami, if he was still hanging around undeployed. Would my younger self know him? Murakami had joined the Corps almost the same time as I had, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the early days, hadn’t deployed together until Nkrumah’s Land and Innenin. Would Aiura’s pet Kovacs make the connection? Would he be able to play Murakami successfully? Come to that, would Aiura let her newly double-sleeved creation anywhere near a serving Envoy? Would she dare?
Probably not. And Murakami, with the full weight of the Corps behind him, could look after himself.
Isa.
Oh, shit.
Fifteen-year-old Isa, wearing tough-as-titanium woman-of-the-world like a pantherskin jacket over a soft and privileged upbringing among what was left of Millsport’s middle class. Razor-sharp smart, and just as brittle. Like a pretend edition of little Mito, just before I left for the Envoys. If he found Isa then—
Relax, you’re covered. Only place she can put you is in Tekitomura. They get Isa, they’ve got nothing.
But—
It took me that long, that heartbeat, to care. The knowledge of the gap was a cold revulsion welling up through me.
But he’ll break her in half if she gets in his way. He’ll go through her like angelfire.
Will he? If she reminds you of Mho, isn’t she going to remind him too? It’s the same sister for both of you. Isn’t that going to stop him?
Isn’t it?
I cast my mind back into the murk of operational days with the Corps, and didn’t know.
“Kovacs!”
It was a voice out of the sky. I blinked and looked up from the modelled streets of Millsport. Over our heads, Brasil hung in the air of the virtuality clad in garish orange surf shorts and tatters of low-level cloud. With his physique and long fair hair blown back by stratospheric winds, he looked like a disreputable minor god. I raised a hand in greeting.
“Jack, you’ve got to come and look at this northern approach. It isn’t going to—”
“Got no time for that, Tak. You need to bail out. Right now.”
I felt a tightening around my chest. “What is it?”
“Company,” he said cryptically, and vanished in a twist of white light.
The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep, marine architects and fluid dynamic engineers by appointment, were in north Sourcetown, where the Strip started to morph into resort complexes and beaches with safe surf. It wasn’t a part of town any of Brasil’s crew would have been seen dead in under normal circumstances, but they merged competently enough with the tourist hordes. Only someone who was looking for hardcore surfer poise would have spotted it beneath the violently mismatched high-colour branded beachwear they’d adopted like camouflage. In the sober surroundings of a nilvibe conference chamber ten floors up from the promenade, they looked like an outbreak of some exotic anti-corporate fungal infection.
“A priest, a fucking priest?”
“I’m afraid so.” Sierra Tres told me. “Apparently alone, which I understand is unusual for the New Revelation.”
“Unless they’re borrowing tricks from the Sharyan martyr brigades,” said Virginia Vidaura sombrely. “Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels. What have you been up to, Tak?”
“It’s personal,” I muttered.
“Isn’t it always.” Vidaura grimaced and looked around at the assembled company. Brasil shrugged, and Tres showed no more emotion than usual.
But Ado and Koi both looked angrily intent. “Tak, I think we have a right to know what’s going on. This could jeopardise everything we’re working for.”
“It’s got nothing to do with what we’re working for, Virginia. It’s irrelevant. These bearded fucks are too stupid incompetent to touch us. They’re strictly the bottom o
f the food chain.”
“Stupid or not,” Koi pointed out, “One of them has succeeded in following you here. And is now asking after you in Kem Point.”
“Fine. I’ll go and kill him.”
Mari Ado shook her head. “Not alone, you won’t.”
“Hey, this is my nicking problem, Mari.”
“Tak, calm down.”
“I am fucking calm!”
My shout sank into the nilvibe muffling like pain drowned in IV endorphin. No one said anything for a while. Mari Ado looked pointedly away, out of the window. Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow. Brasil examined the floor with elaborate care. I grimaced and tried again. Quietly.
“Guys, this is my problem, and I would like to deal with it myself.”
“No.” It was Koi. “There is no time for this. We have already spent two days that we can ill afford in preparation. We cannot delay further. Your private vendettas will have to wait.”
“It isn’t going to take—”
“I said no. By tomorrow morning your bearded friend will in any case be looking in entirely the wrong place for you.” The ex-Black Brigade commando turned away, dismissing me the way Virginia Vidaura would sometimes do when we’d performed badly in Envoy training sessions. “Sierra, we’ll need to up the realtime ratio on the construct. Though I don’t imagine it ramps that high anyway, does it?”
Tres shrugged. “Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.”
“That’s fine.” Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. “It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels—the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.”
Tres nodded, already moving. “I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.”
She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.
“Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.”
I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.
“You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?”
Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.
“Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.”
“Yeah, I think we should.”
I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.
The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“You know where I’m going.”
“No.” She tightened up on me. “No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.”
“It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.”
I tried to move towards the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far from reliable option. I swung back towards her, exasperated.
“Virginia, let me go.”
“What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—”
“It isn’t going to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—”
I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own and our eyes were only about a handsbreadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.
“That’s it,” she said. “Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.”
“What is there to talk about?”
She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember—it’s a good few years younger, for one thing—but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair.
Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.
Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.
“Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.”
“I am happy.” She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated.
It’s a tiny spark of the woman I used to know. “I mean, wouldn’t you be? Sentence commuted for cash equivalence. And the money’s still flooding in, there’ll be biocoding work for the next decade. Until the ocean settles down again, we’ve got whole new levels of flow to domesticate, and that’s just locally. Someone’s still got to model the impact where the Mikuni current hits the warm water coming up from Kossuth, and then do something about it. We’ll be tendering as soon as the government funding clears. Josef says the rate we’re going, I’ll have paid off the whole sentence in another ten years.”
“Josef?”
“Oh, yeah, I should have said.” The smile comes out again, wider this time.
More open. “He’s really great, Tak. You should meet him. He’s running the project up there, he’s one of the reasons I got out in the first wave. He was doing the virtual hearings, he was my project liaison when I got out and then we just, ah, you know.”
She looked down at her lap, still smiling.
“You’re blushing, Sarah.”
“I am not.”
“Yeah, you are.” I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. “So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?”
She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. We’re both playing for keeps, Tak.
“He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.”
So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?
“That’s great,” I say.
“And what about you?” she asks with arch concern. “Are you happy?”
I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.
“Well, happy.” I pull another face. “That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?”
“For a while.”
“And what about now?”
I gesture vaguely. “Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.”
“Is it legal?”
“Are you kidding?”
Her face falls. “You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the re-sleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with …”
She shakes her head.
“Criminals?” I ask.
“Don�
��t laugh at me, Tak.”
I sigh. “I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.” She smiled again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it was edged with pain.
“People can change,” she says. “You should try it.”
There’s an awkward pause.
“Maybe I will.”
And another.
“Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—”
“Wo, come on.” I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the table top with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes.
“Have you no self respect, woman? Stay for one more.”
So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.
And I never see her again.
“Sachilowska?” Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. “Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai street.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again what, to spite her?”
Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.
“It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d got out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.”
“So were you.”
“Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.”
“Okay,” Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. “So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.”
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