Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. A half dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament microjacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others—precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.
The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel.
I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.
I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.
Is this enough? Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.
I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.
Is this—
A hand closed on my arm.
The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.
“You,” she said in Japanese, and coughed. “Help me. Help me.”
It was not her voice.
ELEVEN
There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” muttered one of Oishii’s crew.
Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.
We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.
Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.
It wasn’t over. Not nearly.
Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been—none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.
The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.
Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full checkup.
She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?
A detached deCom shrug. Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.
The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.
Burn some of that stored credit, grinned Jadwiga. Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.
The beachhead gate juddered up for us and we passed through into the compound. In comparison to the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ‘fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.
“Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,” Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. “See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?”
Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.
“I’ll go, skipper,” offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing.
Frosted snow crunched under his feet. “Rest of you go get some coffee or something.”
“Cool,” said Jadwiga. “And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” Lazlo rolled his eyes. “Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?”
I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?”
Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head towards the centre of the camp.
“Come on then. Let’s get this over with.”
Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly-heated outer chamber of the command ‘fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets.
Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls and a corner mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots.
Our breath clouded faintly in the air.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.
“What?”
“Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?”
A grin surfaced on his face. “Well, you know I
always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.”
“Las.”
“Okay, okay.” He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. “You were there with her when she woke up, right.”
“Right.”
“What did she say to you? Really.”
I shifted round to look at him. “Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.”
“Yeah.” He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. “See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.”
“Really?” I kept my tone mild.
“Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.” He turned to meet my eyes. “You’ve lost your appetite.”
“She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.”
He shook his head. “Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now, you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.”
“I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.”
And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline. So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.
We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.
“Not going to tell me, huh?”
“There’s nothing to tell, Las.”
More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.
“Look, Micky.” Lazlo hesitated. “I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And to what do I owe this honour?”
“Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—”
The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.
“All yours. See you in the bar.”
We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.
Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ‘fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.
“Oshima’s ill?” he asked flatly.
“Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands.” Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. “Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?”
“The highlands.” Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. “Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work cleanup.”
Lazlo shrugged. “Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have—”
“You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.”
“We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.” The lie came out, Envoy smooth.
Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight—it had been a while since I’d done this. “Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.”
Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.
“You are Serendipity?”
“Yes.”
“The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?”
Tag the pressure point, go after it. “I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.”
“Yes. So I see.” Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. “Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.”
This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. “Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.”
“And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.”
“Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.”
The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.”
“But—”
“We fell back to the north east,” I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. “As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.”
“We? You were involved in that decision?”
“I was bleeding to death,” I repeated.
Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. “You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause we brought the fucking house down on them,” snapped Lazlo. “Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand to fucking hand in a tunnel on our way out.”
Again, Kurumaya favoured the wincefish with a cold stare.
“There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower level structure. If there—”
“If? Fucking if?”
“—were mimints as you claim, they would have been vaporised. The two in the tunnel have been found, and seem to corroborate the story you transmitted to us once you were safely removed to the Uncleared. In the meantime, you may also be interested to know that the sweepers you left behind did encounter karakuri nests several hours later and two kilometres further west. In the ensuing suppression, there were twenty-seven deaths. Nine of them real, stack unrecovered.”
“That is a tragedy,” I said evenly. “But we would not have been able to prevent it. Had we returned with our injured and our damaged command systems, we would only have been a burden. Under the circumstances, we looked for ways to return to full operational strength as rapidly as possible instead.”
“Yes. Your report says that.”
He brooded for a few moments. I flickered another look at Lazlo, in case he was about to open his mouth again. Kurumaya’s eyes lifted to meet mine.
“Very well. You are billeted along with Eminescu’s crew for the time being. I will have a software medic examine Oshim
a, for which you will be billed. Allowing that her condition is stable, there will be a full investigation into the temple incident as soon as the weather clears.”
“What?” Lazlo took a step forward. “You expect us to fucking hang around here while you dig up that mess? No fucking way, man. We’re gone. Back to Tek’to on that rucking ‘loader out there.”
“Las—”
“I do not expect you to stay in Drava, no. I am ordering it. There is a command structure here, whether you like it or not. If you attempt to board the Daikoku Dawn, you will be stopped.” Kurumaya frowned. “I would prefer not to be so direct, but if you force me to, I will have you confined.”
“Confined?” For a couple of seconds, it was as if Lazlo hadn’t heard the word before and was waiting for the command head to explain it to him.
“Fucking confined? We take down five co-ops in the last month, over a dozen autonomous mimints, render safe an entire bunker full of nasty hardware, and this is the fucking thanks we get coming back in?”
Then he yelped and stumbled back, open palm jammed to one eye as if Kurumaya had just poked him in it. The command head got to his feet behind the desk. His voice was sibilant with suddenly uncapped rage.
“No. This is what happens when I can no longer trust the crews I am held responsible for.” He jerked a glance at me. “You. Serendipity. Get him out of here, and convey my instructions to the rest of your companions. I do not expect to have this conversation again. Out, both of you.”
Las was still clutching at his eye. I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him out and he angrily shrugged it away. Muttering, he lifted a trembling finger to point at Kurumaya, then seemed to think better of it and turned on his heel. He made for the door in strides.
I followed him out. At the doorway, I looked back at the command head. It was hard to read anything in the taut face, but I thought I caught a waft of it coming off him nonetheless—rage at disobedience, worse still remorse at the failure to control both situation and self. Disgust at the way things had degenerated, in the command ‘fab right here, right now, and maybe in the market free-for-all of the whole Mecsek Initiative.
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