Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.
“You like this stuff, huh?” Kiyoka asked me through a mouthful of rice.
“Stuff like it. I don’t recognize—”
“Dizzy Csango and Great Laughing Mushroom,” said Orr unexpectedly. “ ‘Down the Ecliptic.’ But it’s a cover of a Blackman Taku float, originally. Taku never would have let the violin in the front door.”
I shot the giant a strange look.
“Don’t listen to him,” Sylvie told me, scratching idly under her hair. “You go back to early Taku and Ide stuff, they’ve got that gypsy twang scribbled all over the place. They only phased it out for Millsport Sessions.”
“That isn’t—”
“Hey, Sylvie!” A youngish-looking command head with hair static-stacked straight up paused at the table. There was a tray of coffees balanced on his left hand and a thick coil of livecable slung over his right shoulder, twitching restlessly. “You guys back already?”
Sylvie grinned. “Hey Oishii. Miss me?”
Oishii made a mock-bow. The tray on his splayed fingers never shifted. “As ever. More than can be said for Kurumaya-san. You plan on seeing him today?”
“You don’t?”
“Nah, we’re not going out. Kasha caught some counterint splash last night, it’ll be a couple of days before she’s up and about. We’re kicking back.” Oishii shrugged. “ ’S paid for. Contingency funding.”
“Fucking contingency fund?” Orr sat up. “What happened here yesterday?”
“You guys don’t know?” Oishii looked around the table, eyes wide. “About last night. You didn’t hear?”
“No,” said Sylvie patiently. “Which is why we’re asking you.”
“Oh, okay. I thought everyone would know by now. We’ve got a co-op cluster on the prowl. Inside the Cleared Zone. Last night it started putting together artillery. Self-propelled gun, a big one. Scorpion chassis. Kurumaya had to scramble everybody before we got shelled.”
“Is there anything left?” asked Orr.
“They don’t know. We took down the primary assemblers along with the gun, but a lot of the smaller stuff scattered. Drones, secondaries, shit like that. Someone said they saw karakuri.”
“Oh crabshit,” Kiyoka snorted.
Oishii shrugged again. “Just what I heard.”
“Mech puppets? No fucking way.” Kiyoka was warming to her theme. “There haven’t been any karakuri in the CZ for better than a year.”
“Haven’t been any co-op machines either,” pointed out Sylvie. “Shit happens. Oishii, you think there’s any chance we’ll get assigned today?”
“You guys?” Oishii’s grin reappeared. “No way, Sylvie. Not after last time.”
Sylvie nodded glumly. “That’s what I thought.”
The jazz track faded out on a lifting note. A voice surged into place behind it, throaty, female, insistent. There was an archaic lilt to the words it used.
“And there Dizzy Csango’s push on the classic ‘Down the Ecliptic,’ new light shed on an old theme, just in the manner Quellism illuminates those ancient iniquities of the economic order we have carried with us all the darkened way from the shores of Earth. Naturally, Dizzy was a confirmed Quellist all his life, and as he many times said—”
Groans went up from the gathered deComs.
“Yeah, fucking methhead junkie all his life, too,” yelled someone.
The propaganda DJ warbled on amid the jeers. She’d been singing the same hardwired song for centuries. But the deCom complaints sounded comfortable, habit as well worn as our protests had been at Watanabe’s place. Orr’s detailed knowledge of Settlement-years jazz began to make some sense.
“Got to hop,” said Oishii. “Maybe catch up with you in the Uncleared, yeah?”
“Maybe, yeah.” Sylvie watched him leave, then leaned in Lazlo’s direction. “How we doing for time?”
The wincefish dug in his pocket and displayed the queue chip. The numbers had shifted to fifty-two. Sylvie blew a disgusted breath.
“So what are karakuri?” I asked.
“Mech puppets.” Kiyoka was dismissive. “Don’t worry, you aren’t going to see any around here. We cleaned them out last year.”
Lazlo stuck the chip back in his pocket. “They’re facilitator units. Come in all shapes and sizes. Little ones start about the size of a ripwing, only they don’t fly. Arms and legs. Armed, sometimes, and they’re fast.” He grinned. “Not a lot of fun.”
A sudden, impatient tightening from Sylvie. She got up.
“I’m going to talk to Kurumaya,” she announced. “I think it’s time to volunteer our services for cleanup.”
General protest, louder than the propaganda DJ had elicited.
“—cannot be serious.”
“Cleanup pays shit, skipper.”
“Fucking grubbing about door-to-door—”
“Guys.” She held up her hands. “I don’t care, all right. If we don’t jump the queue, we’re not getting out of here till tomorrow. And that’s no fucking good. In case any of you’ve forgotten, pretty soon Jad is going to start smelling antisocial.”
Kiyoka looked away. Lazlo and Orr muttered into the dregs of their miso soup.
“Anyone coming with me?”
Silence and averted gazes. I glanced around, then propped myself upright, luxuriating in the new absence of pain.
“Sure. I’ll come. This Kurumaya doesn’t bite, does he?”
• • •
In fact, he looked as if he might.
On Sharya there was a nomad leader I once had dealings with, a sheikh with wealth stacked away in databases all over the planet who chose to spend his days herding semi-domesticated genetically adapted bison back and forth across the Jahan steppe and living out of a solar-powered tent. Directly and indirectly, nearly a hundred thousand hardened steppe nomads owed him allegiance under arms, and when you sat in council with him in that tent, you felt the command coiled inside him.
Shigeo Kurumaya was a paler edition of the same figure. He dominated the command ’fab with the same closemouthed, hard-eyed intensity, for all that he was seated behind a desk laden with monitoring equipment and surrounded by a standing phalanx of deComs awaiting assignment. He was a command head like Sylvie, gray- and black-streaked hair braided back to reveal the central cord bound up in a samurai style a thousand years out of date.
“Special dep, coming through.” Sylvie shouldered a path for us through the other deComs. “Coming through. Special dep. Goddamn it, give me some space here. Special dep.”
They gave ground grudgingly, and we got to the front. Kurumaya barely looked up from his conversation with a team of three deComs sleeved in the slim-young-thing look I was starting to identify as wincefish-standard. His face was impassive.
“You’re on no special deployment that I know of, Oshima-san,” he said quietly, and around us the deComs exploded in angry reaction. Kurumaya stared back and forth at them and the noise quieted.
“As I said—”
Sylvie made a placatory gesture. “I know. Shigeo, I know I don’t have it. I want it. I’m volunteering the Slipins for karakuri cleanup.”
That got some surf, but subdued this time. Kurumaya frowned.
“You’re asking for cleanup?”
“I’m asking for a pass. The guys have run up some heavy debt back home, and they want to get earning six hours ago. If that means door-to-door, we’ll do it.”
“Get in the motherfucking queue, bitch,” said someone behind us.
Sylvie stiffened slightly, but she didn’t turn around. “I might have guessed you’d see it like that, Anton. Going to volunteer, too, are you? Take the gang on house-to-house. Don’t see them thanking you for that, somehow.”
I looked back at the gathered deComs and found Anton, big and blocky looking beneath a command mane dyed half a dozen violently clashing colors. He’d had his eyes lensed so the pupils looked like steel bearings, and there were traceries of circuitwork under
the skin of his Slavic cheekbones. He twitched a little, but he made no move toward Sylvie. His metallic-dull eyes went to Kurumaya.
“Come on, Shigeo.” Sylvie grinned. “Don’t tell me these people are all queuing up for cleaning duty. How many old hands are going to volunteer for this shit. You’re sending the sprogs out on this one, because nobody else will do it for the money. I’m offering you a gift here, and you know it.”
Kurumaya looked her up and down, then nodded the three wincefish aside. They stepped back with sullen expressions. The holomap winked out. Kurumaya leaned back in his chair and stared at Sylvie.
“Oshima-san, the last time I ramped you ahead of schedule, you neglected your assigned duties and disappeared north. How do I know you won’t do the same thing this time?”
“Shig, you sent me to look at wreckage. Someone got there before us, there was nothing left. I told you that.”
“When you finally resurfaced, yes.”
“Oh be reasonable. How was I supposed to deCom what’s already been trashed? We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. How can I trust you this time?”
Sylvie gave out a performance sigh. “Jesus, Shig. You’ve got the excess-capacity ponytail, you do the math. I’m offering you a favor in return for the chance to make some quick cash. Otherwise, I’ve got to wait to clear the queue sometime day after tomorrow, you get nothing but sprog sweepers, everybody loses. What’s the fucking point of that?”
For a long moment, no one moved. Then Kurumaya glanced aside at one of the units on the desk. A datacoil awoke above it.
“Who’s the synth?” he asked casually.
“Oh.” Sylvie made may-I-present gestures. “New recruit. Micky Serendipity. Ordnance backup.”
Kurumaya raised an eyebrow. “Since when does Orr need or want help from anybody?”
“It’s just a tryout. My idea.” Sylvie smiled brightly. “Way I see it, you never can be too backed up out there.”
“That may be so.” Kurumaya turned his gaze on me. “But your new friend here is carrying damage.”
“It’s just a scratch,” I told him.
Colors shifted in the datacoil. Kurumaya glanced sideways, and figures coalesced near the apex. He shrugged.
“Very well. Be at the main gate in an hour, bring your gear. You’ll get standard maintenance rate per day plus ten percent seniority increment. That’s the best I can do. Bonus for any kills you make, MMI chart value.”
She gave him another brilliant smile. “That’ll do fine. We’ll be ready. Nice doing business with you again, Shigeo. Come on, Micky.”
As we turned to go, her face twitched with incoming traffic. She jerked back around to look at Kurumaya, irritated.
“Yes?”
He smiled gently at her. “Just so we’re clear, Oshima-san. You’ll be webbed into a sweep pattern with the others. If you do try and slide out again, I’ll know. I’ll pull your authorization and I’ll have you brought back in, if I have to deploy the whole sweep to do it. You want to be arrested by a bunch of sprogs and then frog-marched back here, you just try me.”
Sylvie produced another sigh, shook her head sorrowfully, and walked out through the throng of queuing deComs. As we passed Anton, he showed his teeth.
“Maintenance rate, Sylvie,” he sneered. “Looks like you found your level at last.”
Then he flinched, his eyes fluttered upward, and his expression blanked as Sylvie reached in and twisted something inside his head. He swayed and the deCom next to him had to grab his arm to steady him. He made a noise like a freak fighter taking a heavy punch. Slurred voice, thick with outrage.
“Fucking—”
“Back off, swamp boy.” It trailed out behind her, laconic, as we left the ’fab.
She hadn’t even looked in his direction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The gate was a single slab of gray alloy armoring six meters across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-meter towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the gray metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.
Kurumaya’s cleanup volunteers stood about in small knots before the gate, muttered conversation laced with brief flares of loud bravado. As Sylvie had predicted, most were young and inexperienced, both qualities telegraphed clearly in the awkwardness with which they handled their equipment and gawked around them. The sparse assortment of hardware they had was none too impressive, either. Weaponry looked to be largely obsolete military surplus, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen vehicles all told—transport for maybe half of the fifty-odd deComs present, some of it not even grav effect. The rest, it seemed, were doing the sweep on foot.
Command heads were few and far between.
“How it’s done,” said Kiyoka complacently. She leaned back on the nose of the grav bug I was riding and folded her arms. The little vehicle rocked slightly on its parking cushion, and I upped the field to compensate. “See, most sprogs got no money to speak of, they come into the game practically systems-blind. Try and earn cash for the upgrades with cleanup work and maybe some easy bounty on the edges of the Uncleared. If they get lucky, they do good work and someone notices them. Maybe some crew with losses takes them on.”
“And if not?”
“Then they go grow their own hair.” Lazlo grinned up from the opened pannier he was rifling through on one of the other two bugs. “Right, skipper?”
“Yeah, just like that.” There was a sour edge in Sylvie’s voice. Stood near the third bug with Orr for company, she was once again trying to make Jadwiga look like a living human being, and the strain was showing. I wasn’t enjoying the process much myself—we’d gotten the dead deCom mounted on one of the bugs, but piloting the vehicle secondhand was beyond Sylvie’s control options, so Jad rode pillion behind me. It would have looked pretty strange if I’d gotten off while we waited and she’d stayed sitting there, so I stayed aboard, too. Sylvie had the corpse drape one arm affectionately on my shoulder and left the other resting on my thigh. From time to time, Jadwiga’s head swiveled and her sunlensed features flexed in something approximating a grin. I tried to look casual about it.
“You don’t want to listen to Las,” Kiyoka advised me. “Not one in twenty sprogs is going to have what it takes to make command. Sure, they could wire the stuff into your head, but you’d just go insane.”
“Yeah, like the skipper here.” Lazlo finished with the pannier, resealed it, and wandered around to the other side.
“What happens,” said Kiyoka patiently. “You look for someone who can stand the heat and you form a co-op. Pool funds till you can pay for them to get the hair plus basic plug-in for everybody else, and there you go. Brand-new crew. What’re you looking at?”
This last to a young deCom who’d wandered over to stare enviously at the grav bugs and the equipment they mounted. He backed up a little at Kiyoka’s tone, but the hunger in his face stayed.
“Dracul line, right?” he said.
“That’s right.” Kiyoka rapped knuckles on the bug’s carapace. “Dracul Forty-one series, only three months off the Millsport factory lines and everything you heard about it is one hundred percent true. Cloaked drives, internally mounted EMP and particle beam battery, fluid response shielding, integrated Nuhanovic smart systems. You name it, they built it in.”
Jadwiga twisted her head in the young deCom’s direction, and I guessed the dead mouth was trying on its grin again. Her hand moved off my shoulder and down my side. I shifted slightly in the seat.
“What’d it cost?” asked our new fan. Behind him, a small crowd of like-minded hardware enthusiasts was gathering.
“More than any of you’ll earn this year.” Kiyoka gestured airily. “Basic package starts at a hundred and twenty grand. And this is not the basic package.”
The young deCom took a couple of steps closer. “Can I—”
>
I speared him with a look. “No you can’t. I’m sitting on this one.”
“Come over here, kid.” Lazlo rapped on the carapace of the bug he was messing about with. “Leave the lovebirds alone—they’re both too hung over for manners. I’ll show you this one. Give you something to aspire to next season.”
Laughter. The little group of sprogs drifted in toward the invitation. I exchanged relieved glances with Kiyoka. Jadwiga patted my thigh and nestled her head on my shoulder. I glared across at Sylvie. Behind us, an address system cleared its throat.
“Gate release in five minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Check your tags.”
• • •
Whine of grav motors, minute scrape of poorly aligned rail runners. The gate lifted jerkily to the top of its twenty-meter run and the deComs trudged or rode, according to their finances, through the space beneath. The livewire coiled and snaked back from the clean field our tags threw down, building itself into restless hedges over head height. We moved along a cleared path whose sides undulated like something out of a bad take dream.
Farther out, the spider blocks shifted on their multiple haunches as they detected the approaching tag fields. When we got closer, they heaved their massive polyhedral bodies up off the cracked evercrete and scuttled aside in reverse imitation of their programmed block-and-crush function. I rode between them with wary attention. One night on Hun Home, I’d sat behind the fortifications of the Kwan Palace and listened to the screams as machines like these wiped out an entire assault wave of insurgent techninjas. For all their bulk and blind sluggishness, it hadn’t taken them very long.
Fifteen carefully negotiated minutes later, we cleared the beachhead’s defenses and spilled untidily out into the streets of Drava. The dock surfacing gave way to rubble-strewn thoroughfares and sporadically intact apartment buildings averaging twenty stories high. The style was Settlement-years utilitarian standard—this close to the water, accommodation had been thrown up to serve the fledgling port, with little thought for aesthetics. Rows of small, recessed windows peered myopically out toward the sea. The raw evercrete walls were scarred from bombardment and worn from centuries of neglect. Bluish gray patches of lichen marked the places where the antibac sheathing had failed.
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