A brief hesitation. “Professor Serendipity, perhaps that information would be better dealt with later. Don’t open your left hand.”
“Yeah, got it. Left hand, don’t open it. Is it fucked?”
“No,” said the construct reluctantly. “Apparently not. But it is the only thing holding you up.”
Shock, like a stake in the chest. Then the rolling wave of false calm as the conditioning kicked in. Envoys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing—waking up in unexpected places is part of the brief. You don’t panic, you just gather data and deal with the situation. I swallowed hard.
“I see.”
“You can open your eyes now.”
I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred meters of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.
The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-gray alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.
“What’s going on, Dig?” I croaked.
“As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable, which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.”
“Recovery bay?” I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. “So how does that work?”
“We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—”
“All right.” I stared grimly up at my closed fist. “How long have I been out?”
“Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high-altitude, high-risk environments.”
No shit.
How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me. They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realization of the fall. Grabbing at something half seen as the stun-blast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.
A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked-muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If, for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.
“Where are the others?”
“They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.”
“So they think I fell all the way.”
“It appears so. The man you referred to as Kovacs has detailed some of his employees to begin a search at the base of the mountain. I understand they will try to recover your body along with that of the woman you mutilated in the firefight.”
“And Sylvie? My colleague?”
“They have taken her with them. I have recorded footage of—”
“Not right now.” I cleared my throat, noticing for the first time how parched it felt. “Look, you said there are openings. Ways back into the eyrie from here. Where’s the nearest?”
“Behind the triflex downspire to your left, there is an entry port ninety-three centimeters in diameter.”
I craned my neck and spotted what I assumed Dig 301 was talking about. The downspire looked very much like a two-meter inverted witch’s hat that massive fists had crumpled badly in three different places. It was surfaced in uneven bluish facets that caught the shadowed light beneath the eyrie and gleamed as if wet. The lowest deformation brought its tip almost horizontal and offered a saddle of sorts that I thought I might be able to cling to. It was less than two meters from where I hung.
Easy. Nothing to it.
If you can make the jump with one arm crippled, that is.
If your trick hand grips better on Martian alloy than it did an hour ago upstairs.
If—
I reached up with my right arm and took hold of the loop of cable, close to my other hand. Very gently, I took up the tension and began to lift myself on the new grip. My left arm twinged as the weight came off it, and a jagged flash of heat spiked through the numbness. My shoulder creaked. The heat branched out across abused ligaments and started turning into something resembling pain. I tried to flex my left hand but got nothing outside a sparking sensation in the fingers. The pain in my shoulder swelled and began to soak down through the muscles of the arm. It felt as if, when it finally got going, it was going to hurt a lot.
I tried again with the fingers of my left hand. This time the sparking gave way to a bone-deep, pulsing ache that brought tears squirting into my eyes. The fingers would not respond. My grip was welded in place.
“Do you wish me to alert emergency services?”
Emergency services: the Tekitomura police, closely followed by deCom security with tidings of Kurumaya’s displeasure, tipped-off local yakuza with the new me at their grinning head, and, who knew, maybe even the Knights of the New Revelation, if they could afford the police bribes and had been keeping up on current events.
“Thanks,” I said weakly. “I think I’ll manage.”
I glanced up at my clamped left hand, back at the triflex downspire, down at the drop. I drew a long hard breath. Then, slowly, I worked my right hand along the cable until it was touching its locked-up mate. Another breath and I hinged my body upward from the waist. Barely recovered nerve tissue in my stomach muscles sputtered protest. I hooked with my right foot, missed, flailed and hooked again. My ankle lodged over the cable. More weight came off my left arm. The pain began in earnest, racking explosions through the joints and down the muscles.
One more breath, one more glance d—
No, don’t fucking look down.
One more breath, teeth gritted.
Then I began, with thumb and forefinger, to unhinge my paralyzed fingers one at a time from the cable.
• • •
I left the swooping bluish gloom of the eyrie’s interior half an hour later, still on the edge of a persistent manic giggle. The adrenaline humor stayed with me all the way along the cantilever arm, down the shaky archaeologue ladder—not easy with one arm barely functional—then the steps. I hit solid ground still smirking stupidly, and picked my way between the cabins with ingrained caution and tiny explosive snorts of hilarity. Even when I got back to the cabin we’d used, even inside and staring at the empty bed I’d left Sylvie in, I could feel the trace of the comedown grin twitching on and off my lips and the laughter still bubbled faintly in my stomach.
It had been a close thing.
Ungripping my fingers from the cable hadn’t been much fun, but compared with the rest of the escapade, it was a joy. Once released, my left arm dropped and hung at the end of a shoulder socket that ached like a bad tooth. It was as much use to me as a deadweight slung around my neck. A sustained minute of cursing before I could bring myself to then unsling my right foot, swing free by my right hand, and use the momentum to make an ungainly leap sideways at the downspire. I grabbed, clawed, found that the Martians for once had built in a material that offered something approaching decent friction, and clamped myself panting into the saddle at the bottom. I stayed like that for a goo
d ten minutes, cheek pressed to the cold alloy.
Careful exploratory leaning and peering showed me the floor hatch Dig 301 had promised, within grasping distance if I stood up on the tip of the downspire. I flexed my left arm, got some response above the elbow, and reckoned it might serve, if nothing else, as a wedge in the hatch. From that position, I could probably lever my legs up and inside.
Another ten minutes and I was sweatily ready to try.
A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.
Nothing to it.
Eventually, I got up and made my way out.
In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat, and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder. The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.
There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.
On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia. Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.
In too much of a hurry.
Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?
I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.
I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.
I wondered what he would do.
I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.
“Dig?”
She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.
“Professor Serendipity?”
“You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?”
“Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic meters of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—”
“Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.”
“Commencing.”
I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.
“And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.”
• • •
He had a good body.
I skipped about in the footage for the best shots, got one as the intruders came up the mountain path toward the cabin. Froze it on him and stared for a while. He had some of the bulk you expect from battlefield custom, but there was a lilt to it, a way of stepping and standing that leaned more toward Total Body theater than combat. Face a smooth blend of more racial variants than you’d usually get on Harlan’s World. Custom-cultured, then. Gene codes brought in from offworld. Skin tanned the color of worn amber, eyes a startling blue. Broad, protruding cheekbones, a wide, full-lipped mouth, and long, crinkled black hair bound back with a static braid. Very pretty.
And very pricey, even for the yakuza.
I quelled the faint scratching of disquiet and got Dig 301 to pan about a bit among the intruders. Another figure caught my eye. Tall and powerful, rainbow-maned. The site microcams yanked in a close-up of steel-lensed eyes and subcutaneous circuitry in a grim, pale face.
Anton.
Anton and at least a couple of slim wincefish types who preceded him up the path with the loose, in-step coordination of deCom operational pitch. One of them was the woman whose foot I’d shot off in the eyrie. Two, no three, more came behind the command head, standing out clearly from the rest of the party now that I was looking for that characteristic scattered-but-meshed pattern.
Somewhere in me, a faint gray sense of loss readied itself for recognition at the sight.
Anton and the Skull Gang.
Kovacs had brought his New Hok hunting dogs back with him.
I thought back to the confusion of the firefight amid the cabins and the eyrie, and it made some more sense. A boatload of yakuza enforcers and a deCom crew, mingled and getting in each other’s way. Very poor logistics for an Envoy. No way I would have made that mistake at his age.
What are you talking about? You just did make that mistake at his age. That’s you out there.
A faint shiver coiled down my spine.
“Dig, move it up to the bedroom again. Where they pull her out.”
The coil jumped and shimmered. The woman with the tangled hyper-wired hair blinked awake among twisted sheets. The crash of gunfire outside had woken her. Eyes wide as she registered what it was. Then the door burst open and the room filled with bulky forms brandishing hardware and yelling. When they saw what they had, the shouting powered down to chuckles. Weapons were put up and someone reached for her. She punched him in the face. A brief struggle flared and guttered out as weight of numbers squashed her speed reflexes. Sheets torn away, efficient disabling blows administered to thigh and solar plexus. While she wheezed on the floor, one grinning thug grabbed at a breast, groped between her legs, and made pumped-hip rutting motions over her. A couple of his companions laughed.
I was seeing it for the second time. Still, the rage leapt up through me like flames. In my palms, the gecko spines sweated awake.
A second enforcer appeared in the doorway, saw what was going on, and bellowed in furious Japanese. The thug leapt away from the woman on the floor. He made a nervous bow, a stammered apology. The newcomer stepped in close and backhanded the man three times with shattering force. The thug cowered against the wall. More yelling from the newcomer. Amid some of the more colorful insults I’d ever heard in Japanese, he was telling someone to bring clothes for the captive.
By the time Kovacs got back from overseeing the hunt for himself, they had her dressed and seated on a chair in the center of the cabin’s main living space. Her hands rested in her lap, wrists bound neatly, one over the other with a restraint patch you couldn’t see. The yakuza stood at a careful distance from her, weapons still out. The would-be romantic sulked in a corner, disarmed, one side of his mouth swollen, upper lip split. Kovacs’s eyes flickered over the damage, and he turned to the enforcer at his side. A muttered exchange the microcams were not amped to pick up. He nodded, looked again at the woman before him. I read a curious hesitation in his stance.
Then he turned back to the cabin door.
“Anton, you want to come in here?”
The Skull Gang command head stepped into the room. When the woman saw him, her mouth twisted.
“You fucking sellout piece of shit.”
Anton’s lip curled, but he said nothing.
“You know each other, I believe.” But there was a faint question in Kovacs’s voice, and he was still watching the woman before him.
Sylvie tipped her gaze at him. “Yeah, I know this asshole. And? Got something to do with you, has it, fuckhead?”
He stared at her, and I tensed in my chair. This segment was first time through for me, and I didn’t know what he’d do. What would I have done at that age? No, scratch that. What was I about to do at that age? My mind fled back through the silted-up decades of violence and rage, trying to anticipate.
But he only smiled.
“No, Mistress Oshima. It has nothing to do with me anymore. You are a package I have to deliver in good condition, that’s all.”
Someone muttered; someone else guffawed. Still cranked tight, my neurachem hearing caught a crude joke about packages. In the coil, my younger self paused. His eyes flickered to the man with the broken lip.
“You. Come here.”
The enforcer didn’t want to. You could see it in his stance. But he was yakuza, and in the end it’s all face with them. He straightened up, met Kovacs’s eyes, and stepped forward with a filed-tooth sneer. Kovacs looked back at him neutrally and nodded.
“Show me your right hand.”
The yakuza tipped his head to one side, gaze still locked on Kovacs’s eyes. It was a gesture of pure insolence. He flipped up his hand, extended fingers, making it a loosely bent blade. He inclined his head again, the other way, still staring deep into this tani piece of shit’s eyes.
Kovacs moved like whiplash on a broken trawler cable.
He snatched the offered hand at the wrist and twisted downward, blocking the other man’s response options with his body. He held the captured arm straight out and his other hand arced over the wrestling lock of both bodies, blaster pointed. A beam flared and sizzled.
The enforcer shrieked as his hand went up in flames. The blaster must have been powered down—most beam weapons will take a limb clean off, vaporized across the width of the blast. This one had only burned away skin and flesh to the bone and tendon. Kovacs held the man a moment longer, then turned him loose with an elbow-strike cuff across the side of the head. The enforcer collapsed across the floor with his scorched hand clamped under his armpit and his trousers visibly stained. He was weeping uncontrollably.
Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.
“Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a god to you. Is that clear?”
Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing-down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.
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