“I’m an Envoy, Tak,” he said finally. “You want to remember that.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m your friend.”
“I’m already sold, Tod. You don’t need to run this routine on me. I’ll take you in Segesvar’s back door on condition you help me fuck him up. Now what’s your end?”
He shrugged. “Aiura has to go down for breach of Protectorate directives. Double-sleeving an Envoy—”
“Ex-Envoy.”
“Speak for yourself. He’s never been officially discharged, even if you have. And even for keeping the copy in the first place, someone in the Harlan hierarchy has to pay. That’s erasure mandatory.”
There was an oddly ragged edge on his voice now. I looked more closely at him. The obvious truth hit home.
“You think they’ve got one of you too, don’t you?”
A wry grin. “There’s something special about you, you’d be the only one they copied? Come on, Tak. Does that make any sense? I checked the records. That intake, there were about a dozen of us recruited from Harlan’s World. Whoever decided on this brilliant little piece of insurance back then, they would have copied us all. We need Aiura alive long enough to tell us where in the Harlan datastacks we can find them.”
“Alright. What else?”
“You know what else,” he said quietly.
I went back to watching the Expanse. “I’m not going to help you slaughter Brasil and the others, Tod.”
“I’m not asking you to. For Virginia’s sake alone, I’ll try to avoid that. But someone has to pay the Bugs’ bill. Tak, they murdered Mitzi Harlan on the streets of Millsport!”
“Big loss. Across the globe, skullwalk editors weep.”
“Alright,” he said grimly. “They also killed fuck knows how many other incidental victims in the process. Law enforcement. Innocent bystanders. I’ve got the latitude to seal this operation up afterwards, marked regime unrest stabilised, no need for further deployment. But I’ve got to show scapegoats, or the Corps auditors are going to be all over it like livewire. You know that, you know how it works. Someone has to pay.”
“Or be seen to.”
“Or be seen to. But it needn’t be Virginia.”
“Ex-Envoy heads planetary rebellion. No, I can see how that wouldn’t play too well with the Corps’ public relations people.”
He stopped. Stared at me with sudden hostility.
“Is that really what you think of me?”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “No. I’m sorry.”
“I’m doing my best to nail this shut with a minimum of pain to people who matter, Tak. And you’re not helping.”
“I know.”
“I need someone for Mitzi Harlan’s murder, and I need a ringleader. Someone who’ll play well as the evil genius behind all this shit. Maybe a couple of others to bulk up the arrest list.”
If in the end I have to fight and die for the ghost and memory of Quellcrist Falconer and not the woman herself, then that will be better than not fighting at all.
Koi’s words in the beached and stalled-out hoverloader on Vchira Beach. The words and the flicker of passion around his face as he spoke them, the passion, perhaps, of a martyr who had missed his moment once before and did not intend to again.
Koi, ex-Black Brigade.
But Sierra Tres had said much the same thing while we hid in the channels and fallen ruins of Eltevedtem. And Brasil’s demeanour said it for him, all the time. Maybe what they all wanted was martyrdom in a cause older and greater and weightier than themselves.
I pushed my thoughts aside, derailed them before they could get where they were going.
“And Sylvie Oshima?” I asked.
“Well.” Another shrug. “As I understand it, she’s been contaminated by something from the Uncleared zones. So allowing we can salvage her from the firefight, we have her cleansed and then hand her back her life. Does that sound reasonable?”
“It sounds untenable.”
I remembered Sylvie talking about the command software aboard Guns for Guevara. No matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. If Koi could fight and die for a ghost, who knew what the neoQuellists would make of Sylvie Oshima, even after her headgear was wiped.
“Is it?”
“Come on, Tod. She’s iconic. Whatever is or isn’t inside her, she could be the focus for a whole new neoQuellist wave. The First Families will want her liquidated on principle.”
Murakami grinned fiercely.
“What the First Families want, and what they get from me are going to be two radically different things, Tak.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He slurred it, for mockery. “Because if they don’t cooperate fully, I’ll promise them an Envoy deployment at assault strength.”
“And if they call your bluff?”
“Tak, I’m an Envoy. Brutalising planetary regimes is what we do. They’ll fold like a fucking deck chair, and you know it. They’re going to be so fucking grateful for the escape clause, they’d have their own children queuing up to tongue my arse clean if I asked.”
I looked at him then, and for just a moment it was as if a door had blown open on my Envoy past. He stood there, still grinning in the glare from the Angier spots, and he could have been me. And I remembered what it had really been like. It wasn’t the belonging that came flooding back to me this time, it was the brutal power of Corps enablement. The liberating savagery that rose out of a bone-deep knowledge that you were feared.
That you were whispered of across the Settled Worlds and that even in the corridors of governance on Earth, the power brokers grew quiet at your name. It was a rush that came on like branded-supply tetrameth. Men and women who might wreck or simply remove from the balance sheet a hundred thousand lives with a gesture, those men and women could be taught fear again, and the instrument of that lesson was the Envoy Corps.
Was you.
I forced an answering smile.
“You’re charming, Tod. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
“Nope.”
And, out of nowhere, the smile stopped being forced. I laughed and it seemed to shake something loose inside me.
“Alright. Talk to me, you bastard. How do we do this?”
He gave me the clownish raised brows again. “I was hoping you’d tell me. You’re the one with the floorplans.”
“Yeah, I meant what’s our assault strength. You’re not planning to use—”
Murakami jerked a thumb at the bulk of Impaler.
“Our spiky-minded friends there? I certainly am.”
“Fuck, Tod, they’re a bunch of meth-head kids. The haiduci are going to shred them.”
He gestured dismissively. “Work with the tools to hand, Tak. You know how it is. They’re young and angry and cranked up on meth, just looking for someone to take it out on. They’ll keep Segesvar occupied long enough for us to get in and do the real damage.”
I glanced at my watch. “You planning to do this tonight?”
“Dawn tomorrow. We’re waiting on Aiura, and according to Tanaseda, she won’t get in until the early hours. Oh yeah.” He tipped his head back and nodded at the sky. “And there’s the weather.”
I followed his gaze. Thick, dark battlements of cloud were piled up overhead, toppling steadily westward across a fragmentary, orange-tinged sky where Hotei’s light still struggled to make itself felt. Daikoku had long ago drowned in a muffled glow on the horizon. And now that I noticed, there was a fresh breeze across the Expanse that carried the unmistakable smell of the sea.
“What about the weather?”
“It’s going to change.” Murakami sniffed. “That storm that was supposed to blow itself out in the southern Nurimono? Didn’t. And now it seems it’s picked up a scoop from some freak north-westerly run-on, and it’s hooking. It’s coming back around.”
Ebisu’s Eavesdrop.
“Are
you sure?”
“Of course I’m not sure, Tak. It’s a fucking weather forecast. But even if we don’t catch the full force of it, a bit of hard wind and horizontal rain wouldn’t go amiss, would it? Chaotic systems, just where we need them.”
“That,” I said carefully, “depends very much on how good a pilot your shaky friend Vlad turns out to be. You know what they call a hookback like this down here, don’t you?”
Murakami looked at me blankly.
“No. Rough luck?”
“No, they call it Ebisu’s Eavesdrop. After the fisherman ghost story?”
“Oh, right.”
This far south, Ebisu isn’t himself. In the north and equatorial regions of Harlan’s World, JapAmanglic cultural dominance makes him the folk god of the sea, patron of sailors and, generally speaking, a good-natured deity to have around. Saint Elmo is cheerily co-opted as an analogue or helper god, so as to include and not upset the more Christian-influenced residents. But in Kossuth, where the East European worker heritage that helped build the World is strong, this live and let live approach is not reciprocated. Ebisu emerges as a demonic submarine presence to scare children to bed with, a monster that in legend saints like Elmo must do battle with to protect the faithful.
“You remember how that story ends?” I asked.
“Sure. Ebisu bestows all these fantastic gifts on the fishermen in return for their hospitality, but he forgets his fishing rod, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, uh, he comes back to get it and just as he’s about to knock he hears the fishermen running down his personal hygiene. His hands smell of fish, he doesn’t clean his teeth, his clothes are shabby. All that stuff you’re supposed to teach kids, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I remember telling this stuff to Suki and Markus, back when they were small.” Murakami gaze grew distant, hazed out on the horizon and the gathering clouds there. “Got to be nearly half a century ago now. You believe that?”
“Finish the story, Tod.”
“Right. Well, uh, let’s see. Ebisu’s pissed off so he stalks in, grabs his rod and as he storms out again, all the gifts he’s given turn to rotting belaweed and dead fish in his wake. He plunges into the sea and the fishermen have crap catches for months afterwards. Moral of the tale—look after your personal hygiene, but even more important, kids, don’t talk about people behind their backs.”
He looked back at me.
“How’d I do?”
“Pretty good for fifty years on. But down here, they tell it a little different. See, Ebisu’s hideously ugly, tentacled and beaked and fanged, he’s a terrifying sight, and the fishermen have a hard time not just running away screaming. But they master their fear and offer him hospitality anyway, which you’re not supposed to do for a demon. So Ebisu gives them all sorts of gifts stolen from ships he’s sunk in the past, and then he leaves. The fishermen heave a massive sigh of relief and start talking it up, how monstrous he was, how terrifying, how smart they all were to get all these gifts out of him, and in the midst of it all back he comes for his trident.”
“Not a rod, then?”
“No, not scary enough I guess. It’s a massive, barbed trident in this version.”
“You’d think they’d have noticed when he left it behind, wouldn’t you?”
“Shut up. Ebisu overhears them bad-mouthing him, and slips away in a black fury, only to come back in the form of a huge storm that obliterates the whole village. Those not drowned get dragged down by his tentacles to an eternity of agony in a watery hell.”
“Lovely.”
“Yeah, similar moral. Don’t talk about people behind their backs but even more important don’t trust those filthy foreign deities from up north.” I lost my smile. “Last time I saw Ebisu’s Eavesdrop, I was still a kid. It came off the sea at the eastern end of Newpest and ripped the inland settlements apart for kilometres along the Expanse shoreline. Killed a hundred people without even trying. It drowned half the weed freighters in the inland harbour before anyone could power them up. The wind picked up the lightweight skimmers and threw them down the streets as far as Harlan Park. Round here, the Eavesdrop is very bad luck.”
“Well yeah, for anyone walking their dog in Harlan Park, it would have been.”
“I’m serious Tod. If this storm does come in and your methed-out pal Vlad can’t handle his helm, we’re likely to find ourselves upside down and trying to breathe belaweed before we get anywhere near Segesvar’s place.”
Murakami frowned a little.
“Let me worry about Vlad,” he said. “You just concentrate on building us an assault plan that works.”
I nodded.
“Right. An assault plan that works on the premier haiduci stronghold in the southern hemisphere, using teenage junkies for shock troops, and a hookback storm for landing cover. By dawn. Sure. How hard can it be?”
The frown again for a moment, then, suddenly, he laughed.
“Now you put it like that, I can hardly wait.” He clapped me on the shoulder and wandered off towards the pirate hoverloader, voice trailing back to me. “I’ll go talk to Vlad now. Going to be one for the annals, Tak. You’ll see. I’ve got a feeling about it. Envoy intuition.”
“Right.”
And out at the horizon, thunder rolled back and forth as if trapped in the narrow space between the cloud base and the ground.
Ebisu, back for his trident, and not much liking what he’d just heard.
FORTY-FIVE
Dawn was still little more than a rinsed-out grey splash thrown over the looming black mass of the stormfront when Impaler cast off her moorings and blasted out across the Expanse. At assault speed, she made a noise as if she were shaking herself to pieces, but as we headed into the storm even that faded before the shriek of the wind and the metallic drumming of rain on her armoured flanks. The forward viewports of the bridge were a shattering mass of water through which heavy-duty wipers flogged with an overworked electronic whining. Dimly, you could see the normally sluggish waters of the Expanse whipped into waves. Ebisu’s Eavesdrop had delivered to expectations.
“Like Kasengo all over again,” shouted Murakami, wet-faced and grinning as he squeezed in through the door that led out to the observation deck. His clothes were drenched. Behind him, the wind screamed, grabbed at the doorframe and tried to follow him inside. He fought it off with an effort and slammed the door. Storm autolocks engaged with a solid clunk.
“Visibility’s dropping through the floor. These guys are never going to know what hit them.”
“Then it’ll be nothing like Kasengo,” I said irritably, remembering. My eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. “Those guys were expecting us.”
“Yeah, true.” He raked water out of his hair with both hands and shook it off his fingers onto the floor. “But we still trashed them.”
“Watch that drift,” said Vlad to his helmsman. There was a curious new tone to his voice, an authority I hadn’t seen before, and the worst of his twitchiness seemed to have damped down. “We’re riding the wind here, not giving in to it. Lean on her.”
“Leaning.”
The hoverloader quivered palpably with the manoeuvre. The deck thrummed underfoot. Rain made a new, furious sound on the roof and viewports as our angle of entry to the storm shifted.
“That’s it,” Vlad said serenely. “Hold her like that.”
I stayed on the bridge for a while longer, then nodded at Murakami and slipped down the companionway to the cabin decks. I moved aft, hands braced on the corridor walls to beat the occasional lurches in the hover loader’s stability. Once or twice, crew members appeared and slid past me in the cramped space with practised ease. The air was hot and sticky. A couple of cabins along, I glanced sideways at an opened door and saw one of Vlad’s young pirates, stripped to the waist and bent over unfamiliar modules of hardware on the floor. I took in large, well-shaped breasts, the sheen of sweat on her flesh under harsh white light, short-cut hair damp on t
he nape of her neck. Then she realised I was there and straightened up.
She braced herself with one hand on the cabin wall, folded the other arm across her breasts and met my eyes with a tense glare that I guessed was either meth comedown or combat nerves.
“Got a problem, sam?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, mind was on something else.”
“Yeah? Well, fuck off.”
The cabin door sliced shut. I sighed.
Fair enough.
I found Jad looking similarly tense, but fully dressed. She was seated on the upper of the twin bunks in the cabin we’d been allocated, shard blaster stripped of its magazine and laid under the arch of one booted leg. In her hands were the gleaming halves of a solid-load pistol that I didn’t remember her having before.
I swung into the lower bunk.
“What you got there?”
“Kalashnikov electromag,” she said. “One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.”
“Making friends already, huh?” An accountable sadness hit me as I spoke the words. Maybe something to do with the twin sibling pheromones coming off the Eishundo sleeves. “Wonder where he stole it from.”
“Who says it had to be stolen?”
“I do. These guys are pirates.” I stuck a hand up to her bunk. “Come on, let me have a look at it.”
She snapped the weapon back together and dropped it into my palm. I held it in front of my eyes and nodded. The Kal EM range were famed throughout the Settled Worlds as the silent sidearm of choice, and this was a state-of-the-art model. I grunted and handed it back up.
“Yeah. Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No methhead pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun. He nicked it. Probably killed the owner too. Got to watch the company you keep, Jad.”
“Man, you’re cheerful this morning. Didn’t you get any sleep?”
“The way you were snoring up there? What do you think?”
No reply. I grunted again and drifted into the memories Murakami had stirred up. Kasengo, undistinguished little port town in the barely settled southern hemisphere of Nkrumah’s Land, recently garrisoned with government troops as the political climate worsened and relations with the
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