She smiled in the dim light.
“I am Aiura, yes.”
“Got my fuckhead younger self there with you?”
Another smile. A flicker of eyebrows as she glanced sideways, back the way she’d come. He stepped out of the shadowed archway. There was a grin on his face, but it didn’t look very firmly anchored.
“Here I am, old man. Got something to say to me?”
I eyed the tanned combat frame, the gathered stance and the bound back hair. Like some fucking bad guy from a cut-rate samurai flic.
“Nothing you’d listen to,” I told him. “I’m just trying to sort out the idiot count here.”
“Yeah? Well I’m not the one who just climbed two hundred metres so he could walk into an ambush.”
I ignored the jibe, and looked back at Aiura, who was watching me with amused curiosity.
“I’m here for Sylvie Oshima,” I said quietly.
My younger self coughed laughter. Some of the armoured men and women took it up, but it didn’t last. They were too nervous, there were still too many guns in play. Aiura waited for the last guffaws to skitter out.
“I think we’re all aware of that, Kovacs-san. But I fail to see how you’re going to accomplish your goal.”
“Well, I’d like you to go and fetch her for me.”
More grating laughter. But the security exec’s smile had paled out and she gestured sharply for quiet.
“Be serious, Kovacs-san. I don’t have unlimited patience.”
“Believe me, nor do I. And I’m tired. So you’d better send a couple of our men down to get Sylvie Oshima from whatever interrogation chamber you’re holding her in, and you’d better hope she’s not been harmed in any way, because if she has, this negotiation is over.”
Now it had grown quiet again in the stone garden. There was no more laughter. Envoy conviction, the tone in my voice, the choice of words, the ease in my stance—these things told them to believe.
“With what exactly are you negotiating, Kovacs-san?”
“With the head of Mitzi Harlan,” I said simply.
The quiet cranked tight. Aiura’s face might have been graven from stone for all the reaction it showed. But something in the way she stood changed and I knew I had her.
“Aiura-san, I am not bluffing. Konrad Harlan’s favourite granddaughter was taken by a Quellist assault team in Danchi two minutes ago. Her Secret Service detachment is dead, as is anyone else who mistakenly tried to come to her aid. You have been focused in the wrong place. And you now have less than thirty minutes to render me Sylvie Oshima unharmed—after that, I have no influence over the outcomes. Kill us, take us prisoner. It won’t matter. None of it will make any difference. Mitzi Harlan will die in great pain.”
The moment pivoted. Up on the parapet, it was cool and quiet and I could hear the maelstrom faintly. It was a solid, carefully-engineered plan, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t get me killed. I wondered what would happen if someone shot me off the edge. If I’d be dead before I hit.
“Crabshit!” It was me. He’d stepped towards the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. “You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—”
I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathised—the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.
“Wouldn’t I?” I gestured, “You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there—they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.”
Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.
“You’ll forgive me,” she said politely, “if I don’t take this on trust.”
I nodded. “Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.”
It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed.
She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.
“How do you plan to leave?” she asked me.
“Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain a half dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.”
“Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,” drawled Kovacs. “Not a good time to be flying, tonight.”
I stared back at him with dislike. “I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”
“And Mitzi Harlan?” The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. “What assurances do I have of her safety?”
Brasil stirred at my side, for the first time since the confrontation began.
“We are not murderers.”
“No?” Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. “Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.”
For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. “Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—”
“I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,” I said loudly. “Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.”
Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.
I saw the decision take root in her.
“Very well,” she said briskly. “You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.”
I smeared her a brief smile. “Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?”
They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.
I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.
“Is that her?” asked Tres tautly.
I lifted my free hand. “Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?”
“I would
advise against overreaction.” But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were.
“The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.”
My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.
“Have you fed her?” I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.
“Intravenously.” Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. “You must understand that—”
“We understand perfectly,” said Brasil, “We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.”
He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle.
Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.
“Stand down. All of you.”
I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, “You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.”
A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced towards us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.
I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot, then she looked back at me and gestured an okay. I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.
“Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her. Everybody else stays back.”
It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted round to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the grey-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.
And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoopcopter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer
“You what?”
She leaned closer again. Spoke directly and sibilantly into my ear.
“I said, you send her back to me whole, Kovacs. These joke revolutionaries, that’s a fight we can have another time. But they harm any part of Mitzi Harlan’s mind or body and I’ll spend the rest of my existence hunting you down.”
I grinned back at her in the noise. I raised my voice as she drew back.
“You don’t frighten me, Aiura. I’ve been dealing with scum like you all my life. You’ll get Mitzi back because I said you would. But if you really care that much about her, you’d better start planning some lengthy holidays for her offworld. These guys aren’t nicking about.”
She looked down at Sylvie Oshima.
“It isn’t her, you know,” she shouted. “There’s no way for it to be her. Quellcrist Falconer is dead. Really dead.”
I nodded. “Okay. So if that’s the case, how come she’s got all you First Family fucks so bent out of shape?”
The security exec’s shout became genuinely agitated. “Why? Because, Kovacs, whoever this is—and it’s not Quell—whoever this is, she’s brought back a plague from the Uncleared. A whole new form of death. You ask her about the Qualcrist Protocol when she wakes up, and then ask yourself if what I’ve done here to stop her is so terrible.”
“Boy!” It was my younger self, elbows crooked under Sylvie’s knees, hands spread expressively wide beneath. “Are we going to load this bitch, or are you going to stand there talking about it all night?”
I held his gaze for a long moment, then lifted Sylvie’s head and shoulders carefully up to where Sierra Tres waited in the swoopcopter’s cramped cabin. The other Kovacs shoved hard and the rest of her body slid in after. The move brought him up close beside me.
“This isn’t over,” he yelled in my ear. “You and I have some unfinished business.”
I levered one arm under Sylvie Oshima’s knee, and elbowed him back, away from her. Gazes locked.
“Don’t fucking tempt me,” I shouted. “You bought-and-paid-for little shit.”
He bristled. Brasil surged up close. Aiura laid a hand on my younger self’s arm, and spoke intently into his ear. He backed off. Raised one pistol finger and stabbed it at me. What he said was lost in the wash of the rotors.
Then the Harlan security exec was shepherding him away, back along the parapet to a safe distance. I swung myself aboard the Dracul, made space beside me for Brasil and nodded at Sierra Tres. She spoke directly to the pilot and the swoopcopter loosened its hold on the parapet. I stared out at the other, younger Kovacs. Watched him stare back.
We lifted away.
Beside me, Brasil had a grin plastered across his face like the mask for some ceremony I hadn’t been invited to attend. I nodded back at him wearily. Suddenly, I was shattered, mind and body. The long swim, the unrelenting strain and near-death moments of the climb, the tightwired tension of the face-off—it all came crashing back down on me.
“We did it, Tak,” Brasil bellowed.
I shook my head. Mustered my voice
“So far, so good,” I countered.
“Ah, don’t be like that.”
I shook my head again. Braced in the doorway, I leaned out of the swoopcopter and stared down at the rapidly shrinking array of lights from the Rila citadel. With unaided vision, I couldn’t see any of the figures in the stone garden any more, and I was too tired to crank up the neurachem.
But even over the rapidly increasing space between us, I could still feel his stare, and the unforgiving rage kindled in it.
THIRTY-THREE
We picked up Boubin Islander exactly where she was supposed to be. Isa’s seamanship, via the trimaran’s pilot software, had been impeccable. Sierra Tres talked to the pilot, who seemed, on admittedly very brief acquaintance, to be a decent sort of guy. Given his status as a hostage, he’d shown little nervousness during the flight and once he said something to Sierra Tres that made her laugh out loud. Now he nodded laconically as she spoke into his ear, maxed up a couple of displays on his flight board and the swoopcopter fell away towards the yacht. I gestured for the spare comset again, and fitted it to my ear.
“Still there, Aiura?”
Her voice came back, precise and terrifyingly polite. “I am still listening, Kovacs-san.”
“Good. We’re about to set down. Your flyer here knows to back off rapidly, but just to underline the point, I want the sky clear in all directions—”
“Kovacs-san, I do not have the authority to—”
“Then get it. I don’t believe for a moment that Konrad Harlan can’t have the skies over the whole Millsport Archipelago emptied if he wants it, even if you can’t. So listen carefully. If I see a helicopter anywhere above our horizon for the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see an airborne trace on our radar any time in the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see any vessel at all following us, Mitzi Harlan—”
“You’ve made your point, Kovacs.” The courtesy in her voice was fast evaporating. “You will not be followed.”
“Thank you.”
I tossed the comset back onto the seat next to the pilot. Outside the swoopcopter, the rushing air was murky. There hadn’t been an orbital discharge since we took off, and it looked from the lack of fireworks to the north as if the light show was winding down. Thick cloud was drawing in from the west, smot
hering the rising edge of Hotei. Higher up, Daikoku was thinly veiled and Marikanon gone altogether. It looked as if it might rain.
The Dracul made a tight circle over the trimaran, and I saw a white-faced Isa on deck, waving one of Brasil’s antique frag rifles unconvincingly.
A smile touched the corners of my mouth at the sight. We backed off on the turn and dropped to sea level, then sideslipped in towards the Boubin Islander. I stood in the doorway and waved slowly. Isa’s taut features collapsed in relief and she lowered the frag gun. The pilot perched his craft on the corner of Boubin Islander’s deck and shouted to us over his shoulder.
“End of the ride, people.”
We jumped down, eased Sylvie’s still semi-conscious form out after us and lowered her carefully to the deck. Maelstrom mist coated us like the cold breath of sea sprites. I leaned back into the swoopcopter.
“Thanks. Very smooth. You’d better get out of here.”
He nodded and I stepped back. The Dracul ungrabbed and lifted away.
The nose turned and in seconds it was a hundred metres off, rising into the night sky on a muted chatter. As the noise faded, I turned my attention back to the woman at my feet. Brasil was bent over her, peeling back an eyelid.
“Doesn’t seem to be in too bad shape,” he muttered as I knelt beside him.
“She’s running a light fever, but her breathing’s okay. I’ve got gear below I can check her out with better.”
I put the back of my hand against her cheek. Under the film of spray from the maelstrom, it was hot and papery, the way it had been back in the Uncleared. And for all Brasil’s informed medical opinion, her breathing didn’t sound all that good to me either.
Yeah, well, this is a man who favours recreational virals over drugs. Guess light fever’s a relative term, eh Micky?
Micky? What happened to Kovacs?
Kovacs is back there, crawling up Aiura Harlan’s crack. That’s what happened to Kovacs.
The bright anger, glinting.
“How about we get her below,” suggested Sierra Tres.
“Yeah,” said Isa unkindly. “She looks like shit, man.”
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