“Jad! Fucking wait!”
She paused, hanging off the ladder rung, shard blaster pointing downward. Then waved and went on climbing.
I cursed, stowed the Rapsodia, and went after her up the ladder. Rain cascaded down the walls past me and drummed on my head. I seemed to hear blaster fire somewhere above.
When I got to the top, a hand came down and grasped my wrist. I jolted with shock and looked up to see Jad peering down at me.
“Stay low,” she called. “They’re up here.”
Cautiously, I got my head above the level of the pit and looked out across the network of gantries and spectator galleries that crisscrossed the fight pits. Thick curtains of rain skirled across the view. At more than ten meters, visibility faded to gray; at twenty it was gone. Somewhere on the other side of the farm, I could hear the firefight still raging, but here there was only the storm. Jad lay flat on her belly at the edge of the pit. She saw me cast about and leaned closer.
“They split up,” she shouted in my ear. “Anton’s heading for the moorage space on the far side. My guess is he’s looking for a ride out, or maybe the other you to give him some backup. The other guy cut back through the pens over there, looks like he wants to fight. Fired on me just now.”
I nodded. “All right, you get after Anton, I’ll take care of Segesvar. I’ll cover you when you move.”
“Done.”
I grabbed her shoulder as she rolled over. Pulled her back for a moment. “Jad, you just be fucking careful. If you run into me out there—”
Her teeth split in a grin, and the rain trickled into her teeth.
“Then I’ll waste him for you at no extra charge.”
I joined her on the flat space of the wallwalk, drew the Rapsodia, and dialed it to tight dispersal, maximum range. I squirmed about and settled into a half-reclining crouch.
“Scan up!”
She gathered herself.
“Go!”
She sprinted away from me, along the rail, onto a connecting gantry, and into the murk. Off to the right, a blaster bolt split the curtain of rain. I triggered the shard pistol in reflex, but reckoned it wasn’t close enough. Forty to fifty meters, the armorer in Tekitomura had said, but it helped if you could see what you were shooting at.
So—
I stood up. Bellowed into the storm.
“Hey Rad! You listening? I’m coming to fucking kill you!”
No reply. But no blaster fire, either. I moved warily forward, along the side of the pit gallery, trying to estimate Segesvar’s position.
The fight pits were blunt oval arenas sunk directly into the silt bed of the Expanse, deeper inside than the surrounding waters by about a meter. There were nine of them pressed up against each other in rows of three, thick evercrete walls between topped with interlinked galleries where spectators could stand at the rail and watch the panthers rip each other apart at a safe distance below. Steel-mesh spectator walkways were laid corner-to-corner of each pit to provide much-needed extra space for popular fights. On more than one occasion, I’d seen the galleries packed five deep all around and the cross gantries creaking with the weight of crowds craning to see a death.
The overall honeycomb structure the nine pits formed rose about five meters out of the shallow waters of the Expanse and backed onto the low-lying bubbles of the wet-bunker complex at one side. Adjacent to this edge of the pits and crisscrossed with more gantried service walkways were the rows of smaller feeding pens and long rectangular exercise runs that Impaler had smashed through on her way into the farm. As near as I could make out, it was from the edge of this mangled wreckage that the blaster had fired.
“You hear me Rad, you piece of shit?”
The blaster crashed again. The beam scorched past me, and I hit the evercrete floor, splashing water.
Segesvar’s voice rolled past overhead. “That’s close enough, I think, Tak.”
“Suit yourself,” I shouted back. “It’s all over but the cleaning up anyway.”
“Really? Not got much faith in yourself, have you? He’s over on the new dockside right now, repelling your pirate friends. He’ll throw them back into the Expanse or feed them to the panthers. Can’t you hear?”
I listened and caught the sounds of battle again. Blaster fire and the odd agonized scream. Impossible to know how it was going for anyone, but my own misgivings about Vlad and his methhead crew came back to me. I grimaced.
“Quite smitten, aren’t we!” I yelled. “What’s the matter, you and him been spending time down in the grav gym? Been poking either end of your favorite whore together?”
“Fuck you, Kovacs. At least he still knows how to have fun.”
His voice sounded close, even in the storm. I raised myself slightly and started to crawl along the gallery floor. Get a little closer.
“Right. And that was worth selling me out for?”
“I haven’t sold you out.” The trawler-winch laugh rattled out at me. “I’ve traded you in on a better version. I’m going to do what’s right by this guy instead of you. Because this fucking guy still remembers where he’s from.”
A little closer. Drag yourself a meter at a time through the hammering rain and three centimeters of standing water on the walkways. Away from one pit, around a second. Stay low. Don’t let the hate and anger put you on your feet just yet. Try to push him into making a mistake.
“So does he remember you mewling and crawling in a back alley with your fucking thigh ripped open, Rad? Does he fucking remember that?”
“Yeah, he does. But you know what?” Segesvar’s voice scaled upward. Must have hit a nerve. “He just doesn’t break my balls about it all the fucking time. And he doesn’t milk it to take fucking liberties with my finances.”
A little closer. I pitched my own voice amused.
“Yeah, and he’s plugged you in with the First Families, too. Which is what this is really about, right? You’ve sold out to a bunch of fucking aristos, Rad. Just like the fucking yakuza. You’ll be moving to Millsport next.”
“Hey, fuck you, Kovacs!”
The fury came accompanied by another blaster bolt, but it was nowhere close. I grinned in the rain and dialed the Rapsodia up to maximum dispersal. Pressed myself up out of the water. Cranked the neurachem.
“And I’m the one who’s forgotten where he’s from? Come on, Rad. You’ll be wearing a slit-eyed sleeve before you know it.”
Close enough.
“Hey fuck—”
I rose to my feet and hurled myself forward. His voice cued me in; neurachem vision did the rest. I spotted him crouched at the far side of one of the feeding pens, part shielded by the steel-mesh side of a bridging walkway. The Rapsodia spewed monomol fragments from my fist as I ran around the oval walkway of the fight pit. No time for better aim, just had to hope that—
He yelped and I saw him stagger, clutching at an arm. Savage joy coursed through me, peeled my lips back from my teeth. I fired again and he either collapsed or dived for cover. I leapt the rail between the gallery I was on and the feeding pen beyond. Nearly tripped—didn’t. Swayed back on balance and made a split-second decision. I couldn’t go around on the wall. If Segesvar was still alive, he’d be back on his feet in the time it took, he’d cook me with the blaster. The walkway was a straight sprint, half a dozen meters across the top of the pen. I hit it running.
The metal beneath my feet tilted sickeningly.
Down in the pen, something leapt and snarled. The sea-and-rotting-flesh stink of the panther’s breath came boiling up at me.
Later, I would have time to understand: the feeding pen had taken a glancing blow from Impaler’s arrival, and the evercrete on the side where Segesvar waited had fractured open. That end of the walkway hung by nothing more than bolts ripped halfway loose of their mountings. And somehow, from some similar damage elsewhere in the pen complex, one of the swamp panthers was out.
I was still two meters out from the end of the walkway when the bolts tore all the way out. Ei
shundo reflex threw me forward. I lost the Rapsodia, grabbed at the edge of the pen with both hands. The walkway dropped out from under me. My palms closed on rain-drenched evercrete. One hand slipped. The gecko grip in the other held me up. Somewhere below me, the swamp panther struck sparks from the fallen gantry with its talons, then fell back with a shrill howl. I scrabbled for purchase with my other hand.
Segesvar’s head appeared over the lip of the pen wall. He was pale and there was blood soaking through the right arm of his jacket, but he grinned when he saw me.
“Well, fucking well,” he said, almost conversationally. “My old self-righteous fucking friend Takeshi Kovacs.”
I heaved sideways desperately. Got a heel hooked over the edge of the pen. Segesvar saw it and limped closer.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, and kicked my foot away. I swung out again, barely retaining grip with both hands. He stood above me and stared down for a moment. Then he looked away across the fight pits and nodded with vague satisfaction. The rain hammered down around us.
“So for once I’m looking down on you.”
I panted. “Oh fuck off.”
“You know, that panther down there might even be one of your religious friends. That’d be ironic, eh?”
“Just get on with it, Rad. You’re a sellout piece of shit and nothing you do here is going to prove any different.”
“That’s right, Takeshi. Take the fucking moral high ground.” His face contorted, and for a moment I thought he was going to kick my hands away there and then. “Like you always do. Oh Radul’s a fucking criminal, Radul can’t handle himself, I had to save Radul’s fucking life once. You been doing it since you slimed Yvonna away from me, and you never fucking change.”
I gaped up at him in the rain, the drop below me almost forgotten. Spat water out of my mouth.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You know fucking well what I’m talking about! Watanabe’s that summer, Yvonna Vasarely, with the green eyes.”
Memory flared with the name. Hirata’s Reef, the long-limbed silhouette above me. A sea-wet, salt-tasting body on damp rubber suits.
Hang on tight.
“I.” I shook my head numbly. “I thought she was called Eva.”
“You see, you fucking see.” It came seething up out of him like pus, like poison contained too long. His face distorted with rage. “You didn’t give a shit about her, she was just another nameless fuck for you.”
For long moments, my past swept back over me like surf. The Eishundo sleeve took over and I hung in a lit tunnel of kaleidoscope images from that summer. Out on the deck at Watanabe’s. The heat, pressing down from a leaden sky. Scant breeze across the Expanse, not enough to stir the heavy mirrored wind chimes. Flesh slick with sweat beneath clothing, beaded with it where you could see. Languid talk and laughter, the acrid aroma of seahemp on the air. The green-eyed girl.
“That’s two hundred fucking years ago, Rad. And you weren’t even talking to her most of the time. You were snorting meth out of Malgazorta Bukovski’s cleavage, as per fucking usual.”
“I didn’t know how to. She was.” He locked up. “I fucking cared about her, you cunt.”
At first I couldn’t identify the noise that came out of me. It could have been a choked cough with the rain that forced its way down my throat every time I opened my mouth. It felt a little like a sob, a tiny wrenching sense of something coming loose inside. A slippage, a loss.
But it wasn’t.
It was laughter.
It came up through me after the first spluttering cough like warmth, demanding space in my chest and a way out. It blew the water out of my mouth, and I couldn’t stop it.
“Stop laughing, you fuck.”
I couldn’t stop. I giggled. Fresh energy curled up my arms with the unlooked-for hilarity, into my gecko hands, new tensile strength down the length of every finger.
“You stupid bastard, Rad. She was Newpest money, she wasn’t ever going to waste herself on street like us. She went off to study in Millsport that autumn and I never saw her again. She told me I’d never see her again. Said not to get hung up about it, we’d had fun but it wasn’t our lives.” Barely conscious of what I was doing, I found I’d started to heave myself up to the lip of the pen while he stared at me. The hard evercrete edge of it against my chest. Panting as I talked. “You really think. You’d ever have gotten near someone like that, Rad? Thought she’d have your. Babies, and sit on Spekny Wharf with the other gang wives? Waiting for you to come home. Fried from Watanabe’s at dawn? I mean.” Between grunts, the laughter came bubbling up again. “How fucking desperate would a woman, any woman, have to be for that?”
“Fuck you!” he screamed, and kicked me in the face.
I suppose I knew it was coming. I was certainly pushing him hard enough. But it all seemed suddenly very distant and unimportant alongside the glittery bright images of that summer. And anyway, it was the Eishundo sleeve, not me.
My left hand lashed out. Grabbed his leg around the calf as it swung back from the kick. Blood gouted from my nose. The gecko grip locked. I yanked back savagely, and he did a ridiculous little one-legged jig at the edge of the pen. He looked down at me, face working.
I fell, and dragged him down.
It wasn’t far to fall. The sides of the pen sloped the same way as the fight pits, and the fallen walkway had jammed itself halfway down the evercrete wall, almost on an even keel. I hit the meshed metal and Segesvar landed on top of me. I lost the air in my lungs. The walkway juddered and scraped down another half a meter. Below us, the panther went crazy, flailing at the rail, trying to tear it down to the floor of the pen. It could smell the blood streaming from my broken nose.
Segesvar squirmed around, fury still in his eyes. I threw a punch. He smothered it. Snarling monosyllables through gritted teeth, he got his injured arm across my throat and leaned on it. It ripped a cry out of him, but he never eased the pressure for a moment. The panther slammed into the side of the fallen gantry, blasting the stink of its breath through the mesh at my side. I saw one raging eye, obliterated by sparks as the talons tore at the metal. It shrilled and slobbered at us like something insane.
Maybe it was.
I kicked and flailed, but Segesvar had me locked down. Nearly two centuries of street violence stored up, he didn’t lose this kind of fight. He glared down at me and the hate fed him strength to beat the pain of the shard-blast damage in his arm. I got one arm free and tried again to punch him in the throat, but he had that covered, too. An elbow block and my fingers barely grazed the side of his face. Then he held my arm locked there and settled his weight harder onto the injured arm that was choking me.
I raised my head and bit through the jacket into the shredded flesh of his forearm. Blood welled up in the cloth and filled my mouth. He screamed, and punched me in the side of the head with his other arm. The pressure on my throat began to tell—I couldn’t breathe anymore. The panther battered at the metal gantrywork, and it shifted. I slipped fractionally sideways.
Used the shift.
Forced my open palm and fingers flat against the side of his face. Dragged downward hard.
The gecko-gene spines bit and gripped the skin. Where the pads at the tips and the base of my fingers pressed hardest, Segesvar’s face tore open. Street-fighter instinct had screwed his eyes shut as I grabbed him, but it did no good. The grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball, and tugged it out on the optic nerve. He screamed, gut deep. A sudden spray of blood squirted red against the gray of the rain, splattered warm on my face. He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood. I yelled and came after him, hooking a punch into the undamaged side of his face that threw him staggering sideways against the walkway rail.
He sprawled there for a second, left hand raised dizzily to block me, right fist curled tight despite the damage the arm had taken.
&
nbsp; And the swamp panther took him down.
There and gone. It was a blur of mane and mantle, forelimb slash and beakgape. Its claws hooked into him at shoulder height and hauled him down off the walkway like a rag doll. He screamed once, and then I heard a single, savage crunch as the beak snapped closed. I didn’t see, but it probably bit him in half there and then.
For what must have been a full minute I stood swaying on the canted walkway, listening to the sound of flesh being torn apart and swallowed, bones being snapped. Finally, I staggered to the rail and made myself look.
I was too late. Nothing in the carnage around the feeding panther looked like it had ever been remotely associated with a human body.
Rain was already sluicing the worst of the blood away.
• • •
Swamp panthers aren’t very bright. Fed, this one showed little or no interest in my continuing existence over its head. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Rapsodia, couldn’t see it, and so set about getting out of the pen. With the multiple fractures Impaler’s arrival had put in the evercrete wall, it wasn’t too difficult. I used the widest crack for leverage, jammed in my feet, and hauled myself up hand-over-hand. With the exception of a bad scare when a chunk of evercrete came away in my hand at the top, it was a swift and uneventful climb. On the way up, something in the Eishundo system gradually stopped my nose bleeding.
I stood at the top and listened for the sounds of battle. Heard nothing above the storm, and even that seemed quieter. The fighting was either done or down to skulk-and-stalk. Apparently I’d underestimated Vlad and his crew.
Yeah, or the haiduci.
Time to find out which.
I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge, and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me, as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much anymore about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—
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