I held down a sudden, irrational flare of dislike. “Isa, what’s the news from Koi’s end?”
“Uh.” She shrugged. “Last time I checked, fine, they were moving—”
“Last time you checked? What the fuck is that, Isa? How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know, I was watching the radar for you!” Her voice rose with hurt. “Saw you were coming in, I thought—”
“How fucking long, Isa?”
She bit her lip and stared back at me. “Not long, alright!”
“You st—” I clenched a fist at my side. Summoned calm. It wasn’t her fault, none of this was her fault. “Isa, I need you to go down and get on the comset right now. Please. Call in, check with Koi that everything’s okay. Tell him we’re done here, we’re on our way out.”
“Okay.” The hurt was still in her face and tone. “I’m going.”
I watched her go, sighed and helped Brasil and Tres lift Sylvie Oshima’s limp, overheated body. Her head lolled back and I had to shift one hand up quickly to support it. The mane of grey hair seemed to twitch in places as it hung, damp with spray, but it was a feeble movement. I looked down into the pale and flushed face and felt my jaw tighten with frustration. Isa was right, she did look like shit. Not what you thought of when you imagined the flashing-eyed, lithe-limbed combat heroine of the Unsettlement.
Not what you’d expect when men like Koi talked of a woken and vengeful ghost.
I don’t know, she’s well on her way to the ghost part.
Ha fucking ha.
Isa appeared at the top of the stern companion way, just as we got there.
Wrapped up in my own sour thoughts, it took me a moment to look up at her face. And by then, it was too late.
“Kovacs, I’m sorry,” she pleaded.
The swoopcopter.
Faintly, the soft strop of rotors, rising out of the backdrop noise from the maelstrom. Death and fury approaching, on ninja wings.
“They’re down,” Isa cried. “First Family commandos tracked them. Ado’s hit, the rest of them are. Half of them are. They got Mitzi Harlan.”
“Who did?” Sierra Tres, eyes gone uncharacteristically wide. “Who’s got her now? Koi or—”
But I already knew the answer to that one.
“Incoming!”
I screamed it. Was already trying to get Sylvie Oshima to the deck without dropping her. Brasil had the same idea, but he was moving in the wrong direction. Sylvie’s body tugged between us. Sierra Tres yelled. We all seemed to be moving in mud, gracelessly slow.
Like a million furious watersprites let loose, the hail of machine-gun fire ripped out of the ocean on our stern, then up across Boubin Islander’s lovingly finished deck. Eerily, it was silent. Water splashed and splattered, harmlessly quiet and playful. Wood and plastic leapt out of everything in splinters around us. Isa screamed.
I got Sylvie down in the stern seats. Landed on top of her. Out of the darkened sky, hard on the heels of its own silenced machine-gun fire, the Dracul machine came hammering across the water at strafing height.
The guns started up again and I rolled off the seat, dragging Sylvie’s unresponsive form down with me. Something blunt smashed against my ribs as I hit the ground in the confined space. I felt the swoopcopter’s shadow pass across me and then it was gone, quietened motors muttering in its wake.
“Kovacs?” It was Brasil, from above on the deck.
“Still here. You?”
“He’s coming back.”
“Of course he fucking is.” I poked my head out of cover and saw the Dracul banking about in the mist-blurred air. The first run had been a stealth assault—he didn’t know we weren’t expecting him. Now it didn’t matter. He’d take his time, sit out at a distance and chew us to shreds.
Motherfucker.
It geysered out of me. All the stored-up fight that the stand-off with Aiura hadn’t allowed a discharge for. I flailed upright in the stern seats, got a grip on the companionway coating and hauled myself onto the deck.
Brasil was crouched there, frag rifle cradled in both arms. He nodded grimly forward. I followed the look and the rage took a new twist inside me. Sierra Tres lay with one leg smashed to red glinting fragments. Isa was down near her, drenched in blood. Her breath was coming in tight little gasps. A couple of metres off, the frag rifle she’d brought up on deck lay abandoned.
I ran to it, scooped it up like a loved child.
Brasil opened fire from the other side of the deck. His frag rifle went off with a ripping, cracking roar and muzzle flash stabbed out a metre from the end of the barrel. The swoopcopter swung in from the right, flinching upward as the pilot spotted the fire. More machine-gun slugs ripped across Boubin Islander’s masts with a pinging sound, too high to worry about. I braced myself against the gently pitching deck and put the stock to my shoulder. Lined up, and started shooting as the Dracul drifted back. The rifle roared in my ear. Not much hope of a hit, but standard frag load is proximity fused and maybe, just maybe—
Maybe he’ll slow down enough for you to get close? Come on, Micky.
For a moment, I remembered the Sunjet, dropped on the parapet as I lifted Sylvie Oshima. If I’d had it now I could have this motherfucker out of the sky as easy as spitting.
Yeah, instead, you’re stuck with one of Brasil’s museum pieces. Nice going,
Micky. That mistake is about to kill you.
The second source of ground fire seemed to have rattled the pilot slightly, for all that nothing we were throwing into the sky had touched him. Maybe he wasn’t a military flyer. He passed over us again at a steep, side-slipping angle, almost snagging on the masts. He was low enough that I saw his masked face peering downward as he banked the machine. Teeth gritted in fury, face soaked with the upcast spray of the maelstrom, I followed him with frag fire, trying to keep him in the sight long enough to get a hit.
And then, in the midst of the gunsnarl and drifting mist, something exploded near the Dracul’s tail. One of us had managed to put a frag shell close enough for proximity fusing. The swoopcopter staggered and pivoted about. It seemed undamaged, but the near miss must have scared the pilot. He kicked his craft upward again, backing around us in a wide, rising arc. The silent machine-gun fire kicked in again, came ripping across the deck towards me. The magazine of the frag gun emptied, locked open. I threw myself sideways, hit the deck and slid towards the rail on spray-slick wood—
And the angelfire reached down.
Out of nowhere, a long probing finger of blue. It stabbed out of the clouds, sliced across the spray-soaked air and abruptly the swoopcopter was gone. No more machine-gun fire scuttling greedily at me, no explosion, no real noise outside the crackle of abused air molecules in the path of the beam. The sky where the Dracul had been caught fire, flared up and then faded into the glow of an afterimage on my retina.
—and I slammed into the rail.
For a long moment there was only the sound of the maelstrom and the slap of wavelets against the hull just below me. I craned my head up and stared. The sky remained stubbornly empty.
“Got you, you motherfucker,” I whispered to it.
Memory slotted. I got myself upright and ran to where Isa and Sierra Tres both lay in running swipes of spray-diluted blood. Tres had propped herself against the side of the fairweather cockpit, and was tying herself a tourniquet from shreds of blood-soaked cloth. Her teeth gritted as she pulled it tight—a single grunt of pain got past her. She caught my eye and nodded, then rolled her head to where Brasil crouched beside Isa, hands frantic over the teenager’s sprawled body. I came and peered over his shoulder.
She must have taken six or seven slugs through the stomach and legs.
Below the chest, it looked as if she’d been savaged by a swamp panther.
Her face was still now, and the panting breaths from before had slowed.
Brasil looked up at me and shook his head.
“Isa?” I got on my knees beside her in her blood. “Isa, tal
k to me.”
“Kovacs?” She tried to roll her head towards me, but it barely moved. I leaned closer, put my face close to hers.
“I’m here, Isa.”
“I’m sorry Kovacs,” she moaned. Her voice was a little girl’s, barely above a high whisper. “I didn’t think.”
I swallowed. “Isa—”
“I’m sorry—”
And, abruptly, she stopped breathing.
THIRTY-FOUR
At the heart of the maze-like group of islets and reefs wryly named Eltevedtem, there was once a tower over two kilometres high. The Martians built it directly up from the seabed, for reasons best known to themselves, and just short of half a million years ago, equally inexplicably, it fell into the ocean. Most of the wreckage ended up littered across the local seabed, but in places you can still find massive, shattered remnants on land. Over time, the ruins became part of the landscape of whichever islet or reef they had smashed down onto, but even this subliminal presence was enough to ensure that Eltevedtem remained largely unpeopled. The fishing villages on the northern arm of the Millsport Archipelago, at a couple of dozen kilometres distant, were the closest human habitation. Millsport itself lay over a hundred kilometres further south. And Eltevedtem (lost in one of the pre-Settlement Magyar dialects) could have swallowed a whole flotilla of shallow-draught vessels, if said flotilla didn’t want to be found. There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.
It was a good place to hide.
From external pursuers, anyway.
I leaned on Boubin Islander’s rail and stared down into limpid waters.
Five metres below the surface, a brightly-coloured mix of native and colonial fish nosed around the white spraycrete sarcophagus we’d buried Isa in. I had some vague idea about contacting her family once we got clear, to let them know where she was, but it seemed a pointless gesture.
When a sleeve is dead, it’s dead. And Isa’s parents weren’t going to be any less sick with worry when a recovery team cracked open the spraycrete and found someone had carved the stack out of her spine.
It lay in my pocket now, Isa’s soul, for want of a better descriptor, and I could feel something changing in me with the solitary weight it made against my fingers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t dare leave it for anyone else to find either. Isa was solidly implicated in the Millsport raid, and that meant a virtual interrogation suite up at Rila Crags if she was ever retrieved. For now, I would have to carry her, the way I’d carried dead priests southward to punishment, the way I’d carried Yukio Hirayasu and his gangster colleague in case I needed them to bargain with.
I’d left the yakuza stacks buried in the sand under Brasil’s house on Vchira Beach, and I hadn’t expected the pocket to fill again so soon. Had even, on the voyage east to Millsport, caught myself taking occasional, momentary pleasure in the strange new lack of carriage, until the memories of Sarah and the habit of hatred came searing back.
Now the pocket was weighted again, like some fucked-up modern day variant on the Ebisu-cursed trawl net in the Tanaka legend, destined forever to bring up the bodies of drowned sailors and nothing much else.
There didn’t seem to be any way for it to stay empty, and I didn’t know what I felt any more.
For nearly two years, it hadn’t been that way. Certainty had coloured my existence a grained monochrome. I’d been able to reach into my pocket and weigh its varying contents in my palm with a dark, hardened satisfaction.
There was a sense of slow accumulation, an assembly of tiny increments in the balance pan that sat opposite the colossal tonnage of Sarah Sachilowska’s extinction. For two years I’d needed no purpose other than that pocket and its handful of stolen souls. I’d needed no future, no outlook that didn’t revolve around feeding the pocket and the swamp panther pens at Segesvar’s place out on the Expanse.
Really? So what happened at Tekitomura?
Movement on the rail. The cables thrummed and bounced gently. I looked up and saw Sierra Tres maneuvering herself forward, braced on the rail with both arms and hopping on her uninjured leg. Her usually inexpressive face was taut with frustration. Under different circumstances, it might have been comical, but from the hacked-off trousers at mid-thigh, her other leg was encased in transparent plaster that laid bare the wounds beneath.
We’d been skulking in Eltevedtem for nearly three days now, and Brasil had used the time as well as the limited battlefield medical gear we had would allow. The flesh beneath Tres’s plaster was a black and purple swollen mess, punched through and torn by the swoopcopter’s machine gun fire, but the wounds had been cleaned and dusted. Blue and red tags marched down the damaged portions, marking the points at which Brasil had inserted rapid regrowth bios. A flex-alloy boot cushioned the bottom end of the cast against outside impact, but walking on it would have required more painkillers than Tres seemed prepared to take.
“You should be lying down,” I said as she joined me.
“Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.”
“Alright.” I went back to staring into the water. “Any word yet?”
She shook her head. “Oshima’s awake, though. Asking for you.”
I lost focus on the fish below me for a moment. Got it back. Made no move to leave the rail or look up again.
“Oshima or Makita?”
“Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?”
I nodded greyly. “So she still thinks she’s—”
“At the moment, yes.”
I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.
“Kovacs.”
I looked back at Tres impatiently. “Yeah, what?”
“Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.
“Hello there Micky Serendipity.”
“Hello.”
“I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.” She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’m fine here.”
She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.
“I understand we may have to move soon,” she said quietly. “On foot.”
“Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.”
“Ah—so that much remains the same.”
“The orbitals?” I nodded. “Yeah, they still r
un at the same parameters as when you—”
I stopped. Gestured. “As they always did.”
Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly
“Tell me,” she said finally. “How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.”
I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.
“Please. I need to know.”
“About three hundred years, local.” I gestured again. “Three hundred and twenty, near enough.”
I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.
“So long,” she murmured.
This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.
Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight.
Some things leave the same teethmarks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.
Or not, I reminded myself.
Go easy on her.
“You didn’t know?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.”
“Who told you?”
“I—” She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.
“Three hundred and twenty years,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.
“I called you,” she said suddenly.
“Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?”
The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.
“I don’t know. I knew.” She cleared her throat. “No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.”
I leaned forward in the seat. “Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?”
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