The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Or someone with stealth combat training.

  Will you shut up.

  I fitted one foot against the edge of the hatch and gave it a cautious shove. The hinges were balanced to a hair - the whole thing swung weightily outward. Without giving myself time to think, I twisted into the gap, Rapsodia tracking for a target.

  Nothing.

  Waist-high steel barrels stood in shiny ranks across the cargo space. The gaps between were too thin to hide a child, let alone a ninja. I crossed to the nearest and read the label. Finest Saffron Seas Luminescent Xenomedusal Extract, cold press filtered. Webjelly oil, designer branded for added value. Courtesy of our entrepreneurial expert on austerity.

  I laughed and felt the tension puddle back out of me.

  Nothing but—

  I sniffed.

  There was a scent, fleeting on the metallic air in the cargo pod.

  And gone.

  The New Hok sleeve’s senses were just acute enough to know it was there, but with the knowledge and the conscious effort, it vanished. Out of nowhere, I had a sudden flash recollection of childhood, an uncharacteristically happy image of warmth and laughter that I couldn’t place. Whatever the smell was, it was something I knew intimately.

  I stowed the Rapsodia and moved back to the hatch.

  ‘There’s nothing in here. I’m coming out.’

  I stepped back into the warm splatter of the rain and heaved the hatch closed again. It locked into place with a solid thunk of security bolts, shutting in whatever trace scent of the past I’d picked up on. The pulsing reddish radiance over my head died out and the alarm, which had settled to an unnoticed background constant, was abruptly silent.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’

  It was the entrepreneur, face tense closing on angry. He had his security in tow. A handful of crew members crowded behind. I sighed.

  ‘Checking on your investment. All sealed and safe, don’t worry. Looks like the pod locks glitched.’ I looked at the crew-woman with the blaster. ‘Or maybe that extra smart ripwing showed up after all and we scared it off. Look, this is a bit of a long shot I know, but is there a sniffer set anywhere aboard?’

  ‘Sniffer set? Like, for the police you mean?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. You could ask the skipper.’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah well, like I said—’

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  The tension in the entrepreneur’s features had made it all the way to anger. At his side, his security glared supportively.

  ‘Yeah, and I answered it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere. Tomas.’

  I cut the bodyguard a glance before he could act on the command. He froze and shifted his feet. I shifted my eyes to the entrepreneur, fighting a strong urge to push the confrontation as far as it would go. Since my run-in with the priest’s wife, I’d been twitchy with the need to do violence.

  ‘If your tuskhead here touches me, he’s going to need surgery. And if you don’t get out of my way, so will you. I already told you, your cargo’s safe. Now suppose you step aside and save us both an embarrassing scene.’

  He looked back at Tomas, and evidently read something instructive in his expression. He moved.

  ‘Thank you.’ I pushed my way through the gathered crewmembers behind her. ‘Anybody seen Japaridze?’

  ‘On the bridge, probably,’ said someone. ‘But Itsuko’s right, there’s no sniffer gear on the ’duci. We’re not fucking seacops.’

  Laughter. Someone sang the signature tune to the experia show of the same name, and the rest took it up for a couple of bars. I smiled thinly and shouldered my way past. As I left, I heard the entrepreneur demanding loudly that the hatch be opened again immediately.

  Oh well.

  I went to find Japaridze anyway. If nothing else, at least he could provide me with a drink.

  The squall passed.

  I sat on the bridge and watched it fade away eastward on the weather scanners, wishing the knot inside me would do the same. Outside, the sky brightened and the waves stopped knocking the Haiduci’s Daughter about. Japaridze slacked off the emergency drive to the grav motors and the freighter settled back into her former stability.

  ‘So tell me the truth, sam.’ He poured me another shot of Millsport blended and settled back in the chair across the navigation table. There was no one else on the bridge. ‘You’re casing the webjelly consignment, right?’

  I lifted an eyebrow. ‘Well, if I am, that’s a pretty unhealthy question to ask me.’

  ‘Nah, not really.’ He winked and knocked his drink back in one. Since it had become clear that the weather was going to leave us alone, he’d let himself get slightly drunk. ‘That fucking prick, for me you can have his cargo. Just so long as you don’t try and lift it while it’s on the ’duci.’

  ‘Right.’ I raised my glass to him.

  ‘So who is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Who you running radar for? The yak? Weed Expanse gangs? Thing is—’

  ‘Ari, I’m serious.’

  He blinked at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Think about it. If I’m a yak research squad, you go asking questions like that, it’s going to get you Really Dead.’

  ‘Ah, crabshit. You ain’t going to kill me.’ He got up, leaned across the table towards me and peered into my face. ‘You don’t got the eyes for it. I can tell.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yeah, besides.’ He sank back into his seat and gestured untidily with his glass. ‘Who’s going to sail this tub into Newpest harbour if I’m dead. She’s not like those Saffron Line AI babies, you know. Every now and then, she needs the human touch.’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess I could scare someone on the crew into it. Show them your smouldering corpse for an incentive.’

  ‘That’s good thinking.’ He grinned and reached for the bottle again. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But like I said, I don’t see it in your eyes.’

  ‘Met a lot like me, have you?’

  He filled our glasses. ‘Man, I was one like you. I grew up in Newpest just like you and I was a pirate, just like you. Used to work route robberies with the Seven Per Cent Angels. Crabshit stuff, skimmer cargo coming in over the Expanse.’ He paused and looked me in the eyes. ‘I got caught.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘Yeah, it was too bad. They took the flesh off me and they dumped me in the store for three decades, near enough. When I got out, all they had to sleeve me in was some wired-for-shit methhead’s body. My family had all grown up, or moved away, or, you know, died or something. I had a daughter, seven years old when I went in, she was ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing by the time I got out. She had a life and a family of her own. Even if I had known how to relate to her, she didn’t want to know me. I was just a thirty-year gap in her eyes. Likewise her mother, who’d found some other guy, had kids, well, you know how it goes.’ He sank his drink, shivered and stared at me through suddenly teared eyes. He poured himself another. ‘My brother died in a bug crash a couple of years after I went away, no insurance, no way to get a re-sleeve. My sister was in the store, she’d gone in ten years after me, wasn’t getting out for another twenty. There’d been another brother, born a couple of years after I went away, I didn’t know what to say to him. My father and mother were separated - he died first, got his re-sleeve policy through and went off somewhere to be young, free and single again. Wouldn’t wait for her. I went to see her but all she did was stare out of the window with this smile on her face, kept saying soon, soon, it’ll be my turn soon. Gave me the fucking creeps.’

  ‘So you went back to the Angels.’

  ‘Good guess.’

  I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.

  ‘Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking
over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. ‘How long this time?’

  He grinned, like a man in front of a fire. ‘Eighty-five.’

  We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whisky and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.

  ‘This time, I lost them all for good. Whatever second life my mother got, I missed that. And she’d opted out of a third time around, just had herself stored with instructions for rental re-sleeve on a list of family occasions. Release of her son Ari from penal storage wasn’t on that list, so I took the hint. Brother was still dead, sister got out of the store while I was in, went north decades before I got out again, I don’t know where. Maybe looking for her father.’

  ‘And your daughter’s family?’

  He laughed and shrugged. ‘Daughter, grandkids. Man, by then I was another two generations out of step with them, I didn’t even try to catch up. I just took what I had and I ran with it.’

  ‘Which was what?’ I nodded at him. ‘This sleeve?’

  ‘Yeah, this sleeve. I got what you might call lucky. Belonged to some rayhunter captain got busted for hooking out of a First Families marine estate. Good solid sleeve, well looked after. Some useful seagoing software racked in, and some weird instinctive shit for weather. Sort of painted a career for me all on its own. I got a loan on a boat, made some money. Got a bigger boat, made some more. Got the ’duci. Got a woman back in Newpest now. Couple of kids I’m watching grow up.’

  I raised my glass without irony. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah, well, like I said. I got lucky.’

  ‘And you’re telling me this because?’

  He leaned forward on the table and looked at me. ‘You know why I’m telling you this.’

  I quelled a grin. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know. He was doing his best.

  ‘Alright, Ari. Tell you what, I’ll lay off your cargo. I’ll mend my ways, give up piracy and start a family. Thanks for the tip.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not telling you anything you don’t already know, sam. Just reminding you, is all. 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.’

  He was right, of course.

  As a messenger, he was also a little late.

  Evening caught up with the Haiduci’s Daughter on her westward curve a couple of hours later. The sun split like a cracked egg either side of a rising Hotei and reddish light soaked out across the horizon in both directions. The low rise of Kossuth’s gulf coastline painted a thick black base for the picture. High above, thin cloud cover glowed like a shovel full of heated coins.

  I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset - I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.

  I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines - if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.

  Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between. Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground - might as well see some of it, I reasoned at the time.

  And then Innenin.

  When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime. Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the Innenin debacle, I ended up back on Harlan’s World running rings around local law enforcement and the petty criminals they played tag with. We carved out reputations, stayed ahead of the game, went through anyone who opposed us like angelfire.

  An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.

  It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right - all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some unnoticed moment during my time in the Corps.

  But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.

  I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.

  On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked south east where the dark was gathering, approximately towards Newpest.

  I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.

  Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half dozen metres away. I edged round to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good metre from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.

  ‘Fuck are you looking at?’

  For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.

  ‘I’m not going to see them,’ I told it after a while. ‘So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.’

  But still, in the fast growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.

  Like not being alone.

  The ripwing and I sat hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We pulled into Newpest harbour a little after noon the next day and crept to a mooring with painstaking care. The whole port was jammed up with hoverloaders and other vessels fleeing the threat of heavy weather in the eastern gulf, and the harbourmaster software had arranged them according to some counterintuitive mathematical scheme that the Haiduci’s Daughter didn’t have an interface for. Japaridze took the con on manual, cursing
machines in general and the Port Authority AI in particular as we wound our way through the apparently random thickets of shipping.

  ‘Fucking upgrade this, upgrade that. If I’d wanted to be a fucking techhead, I would have got a job with deCom.’

  Like me, he had a slight but insistent hangover.

  We said our farewells on the bridge and I went down to the foredeck. I tossed my pack ashore while the autograpples were still cranking us in, and leapt the closing gap to the wharf from the rail. It got me a couple of glances from bystanders but no uniformed attention. With a circling storm out on the horizon and a harbour packed to capacity, port security had other things to worry about than reckless disembarkation. I picked up the pack, slung it on one shoulder and drifted into the sparse flow of pedestrians along the wharf. The heat settled on me wetly. In a couple of minutes I was off the waterfront, streaming sweat and flagging down an autocab.

  ‘Inland harbour,’ I told it. ‘Charter terminal, and hurry.’

  The cab made a U-turn and plunged back into the main cross-town thoroughfares. Newpest unfolded around me.

  It’s changed a lot in the couple of centuries I’ve been coming back to it. The town I grew up in was low-lying, like the land it was built on, sprawling in stormproofed snub profile units and super-bubbles across the isthmus between the sea and the great clogged lake that would later become the Weed Expanse. Back then Newpest carried the fragrance of belaweed and the stink of the various industrial processes it was subject to like the mix of perfume and body odour on a cheap whore. You couldn’t get away from either without leaving town.

  So much for youthful reminiscence.

  As the Unsettlement receded into history, a return to relative prosperity brought new growth, out along the inner shore of the Expanse and the long curve of the coastline, and upward into the tropical sky. The height of the buildings in central Newpest soared, rising on the back of increased confidence in storm management technology and a burgeoning, moneyed middle class who needed to live near their investments but didn’t want to have to smell them. By the time I joined the Envoys, environmental legislation had started to take the edge off the air at ground level and there were skyscrapers downtown to rival anything you could find in Millsport.