She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.
“I understand we may have to move soon,” she said quietly. “On foot.”
“Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.”
“Ah—so that much remains the same.”
“The orbitals?” I nodded. “Yeah, they still run at the same parameters as when you—”
I stopped. Gestured. “As they always did.”
Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly.
“Tell me,” she said finally. “How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.”
I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.
“Please. I need to know.”
“About three hundred years, local.” I gestured again. “Three hundred and twenty, near enough.”
I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.
“So long,” she murmured.
This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.
Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Percent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight. Some things leave the same tooth marks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.
Or not, I reminded myself.
Go easy on her.
“You didn’t know?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.”
“Who told you?”
“I—” She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.
“Three hundred and twenty years,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.
“I called you,” she said suddenly.
“Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?”
The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.
“I don’t know. I knew.” She cleared her throat. “No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.”
I leaned forward in the seat. “Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?”
“In here, somewhere. In here.”
The woman in the bunk closed her eyes. For a minute or so I thought she’d gone to sleep. I would have left the cabin, gone back up on deck, but there was nothing up there I wanted. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open again and she nodded as if something had just been confirmed in her ear.
“There’s a.” She swallowed. “A space down there. Like a premillennial prison. Rows of cells. Walkways and corridors. There are things down there she says she caught, like catching bottleback from a charter yacht. Or maybe caught like a disease? It’s, it shades together. Does that make any sense?”
I thought about the command software. I remembered Sylvie Oshima’s words on the crossing to Drava.
—mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it, and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterward, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.
I nodded. Wondered what it might take to break out of that kind of prison. What kind of person—or thing—you might have to be.
Ghosts of things.
“Yeah, it makes sense.” And then, before I could stop myself, “So is that where you come in, Nadia? You something she caught?”
A brief look of horror flitted across the gaunt features.
“Grigori,” she whispered. “There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.”
“Grigori who?”
“Grigori Ishii.” It was still a whisper. Then the inward-looking horror was gone, wiped away, and she was staring hard at me. “You don’t think I’m real, do you, Micky Serendipity?”
A flicker of unease in the back of my head. The name Grigori Ishii chimed somewhere in the pre-Envoy depths of my memory. I stared back at the woman in the bed.
Go easy on her.
Fuck that.
I stood up. “I don’t know what you are. But I’ll tell you this for nothing, you’re not Nadia Makita. Nadia Makita is dead.”
“Yes,” she said thinly. “I’d rather gathered that. But evidently she was backed up and stored before she died, because here I am.”
I shook my head.
“No, you’re not. You’re not here at all in any guaranteed sense. Nadia Makita is gone, vaporized. And there’s no evidence that a copy was made. No technical explanation for how a copy could have gotten into Sylvie Oshima’s command software, even if it did exist. In fact, no evidence that you’re anything other than a faked personality casing.”
“I think that’s enough, Tak.” Brasil stepped suddenly into the cabin. His face wasn’t friendly. “We can leave it here.”
I swung on him, skinning teeth in a tight grin. “That’s your considered medical opinion, is it, Jack? Or just a Quellist revolutionary tenet? Truth in small and controlled doses. Nothing the patient won’t be able to handle.”
“No, Tak,” he said quietly. “It’s a warning. Time for you to come out of the water.”
My hands flexed gently.
“Don’t try me, Jack.”
“You’re not the only one with neurachem, Tak.”
The moment hung, then pivoted and died as the ridiculous dynamics of it caught up with me. Sierra Tres was right. It wasn’t this fractured woman’s fault Isa was dead; nor was it Brasil’s. And besides, any damage I’d wanted to do to the ghost of Nadia Makita was now done. I nodded and dropped the combat tension like a coat. I brushed past Brasil and reached the door behind him. Turned briefly back to the woman in the bunk.
“Whatever you are, I want Sylvie Oshima back unharmed.” I jerked my head at Brasil. “I brought you these new friends you’ve got, but I’m not one of them. If I think you’ve done anything to damage Oshima, I’ll go through them all like angelfire just to get to you. You keep that in mind.”
She looked steadily back at me.
“Thank you,” she said without apparent irony. “I will.”
• • •
On deck, I found Sierra Tres propped in a steel-frame chair, scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars. I came and stood behind her, cranking up the neurachem as I peered out in the same direction. It was a limited view—Boubin Islander was tucked away in the shade of a massive, jagged fragment of toppled Martian architecture that had hit the shoal below us, bedded there, and fossilized into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogs, and now the view out from under the ruin was obscured by ropes of hanging foliage.
“See anything?”
“I think they’ve put up microlights.” Tres put aside the binoculars. “It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.”
“Still twitchy, then.”
“Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred
years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.”
“Well.” I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. “Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?”
“You don’t think he made four hundred meters, either, then?”
“I don’t know.” I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. “He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defenses. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred meters off the water when it took them all out.”
She shot me an amused look. “I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.”
“Oh. Sorry. You seem older.”
“Thank you.”
“In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.”
“Or we got lucky.”
“Or we got lucky,” I echoed.
Brasil came up the companionway and stalked toward us. There was an uncharacteristic anger flickering around in the way he moved and he looked at me with open dislike. I spared him a return glance, then went back to staring at the water.
“I won’t have you talking to her like that again,” he told me.
“Oh shut up.”
“I’m serious, Kovacs. We all know you’ve got a problem with political commitment, but I’m not going to let you vomit up whatever fucked-in-the-head rage you’re carrying all over this woman.”
I swung on him.
“This woman? This woman? You’re calling me fucked in the head. This woman you’re talking about is not a human being. She’s a fragment, a ghost at best.”
“We don’t know that yet,” said Tres quietly.
“Oh please. Can neither of you see what’s happening here? You’re projecting your desires onto a fucking digitized human sketch. Already. Is this what’s going to happen if we get her back to Kossuth? Are we going to build a whole fucking revolutionary movement on a mythological scrap?”
Brasil shook his head. “The movement’s already there. It doesn’t need to be built, it’s ready to happen.”
“Yeah, all it needs is a figurehead.” I turned away as the old weariness rose in me, stronger even than the anger. “Which is handy, because all you’ve got is a fucking figurehead.”
“You do not know that.”
“No, you’re right.” I began to walk away. There isn’t far you can go on a thirty-meter boat, but I was going to open up as much space as I could between myself and these sudden idiots. Then something made me swing about to face them both across the deck. My voice rose in abrupt fury. “I don’t know that. I don’t know that Nadia Makita’s whole personality wasn’t stored and then left lying around in New Hok like some unexploded shell nobody wanted. I don’t know that it didn’t somehow find a way to get uploaded into a passing deCom. But what are the fucking chances?”
“We can’t make that judgment yet,” Brasil said, coming after me. “We need to get her to Koi.”
“Koi?” I laughed savagely. “Oh, that’s good. Fucking Koi. Jack, do you really think you’re ever going to see Koi again? Koi is more than likely blasted meat scraped up off some back street in Millsport. Or better yet, he’s an interrogation guest of Aiura Harlan. Don’t you get it, Jack? It is over. Your neoQuellist resurgence is fucked. Koi is gone, probably the others are, too. Just more fucking casualties on the glorious road to revolutionary change.”
“Kovacs, you think I don’t feel for what happened to Isa?”
“I think, Jack, that provided we rescued that shell of a myth we’ve got down there, you don’t much care who died or how.”
Sierra Tres moved awkwardly on the rail. “Isa chose to get involved. She knew the risks. She took the pay. She was a free agent.”
“She was fifteen fucking years old!”
Neither of them said anything. They just watched me. The slap of water on the hull grew audible. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath, and looked at them again. I nodded.
“It’s okay,” I said tiredly. “I see where this is going. I’ve seen it before, I saw it on Sanction Four. Fucking Joshua Kemp said it at Indigo City. What we crave is the revolutionary momentum. How we get it is almost irrelevant, and certainly not admitting of ethical debate—historical outcome will be the final moral arbiter. If that isn’t Quellcrist Falconer down there, you’re going to turn it into her anyway. Aren’t you?”
The two surfers traded a look. I nodded again.
“Yeah. And where does that leave Sylvie Oshima? She didn’t choose this. She wasn’t a free agent. She was a fucking innocent bystander. And she’ll be just the first of many if you get what you want.”
More silence. Finally, Brasil shrugged.
“So why did you come to us in the first place?”
“Because I fucking misjudged you, Jack. Because I remembered you all as better than this sad wish-fulfillment shit.”
Another shrug. “Then you remember wrong.”
“So it seems.”
“I think you came to us out of lack of options,” said Sierra Tres soberly. “And you must have known that we would value the potential existence of Nadia Makita above the host personality.”
“Host?”
“No one wants to harm Oshima unnecessarily. But if a sacrifice is necessary, and this is Makita—”
“But it isn’t. Open your fucking eyes, Sierra.”
“Maybe not. But let’s be brutally honest, Kovacs. If this is Makita, then she’s worth a lot more to the people of Harlan’s World than some mercenary deCom bounty hunter you happen to have taken a shine to.”
I felt a cold, destructive ease stealing up through me as I looked at Tres. It felt almost comfortable, like homecoming.
“Maybe she’s worth a lot more than some crippled neoQuellist surf bunny, too. Did that ever occur to you? Prepared to make that sacrifice, are you?”
She looked down at her leg, then back at me.
“Of course I am,” she said gently, as if explaining to a child. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
• • •
An hour later, the covert channel broke open into sudden, excited transmission. Detail was confused but the gist was jubilantly clear. Soseki Koi and a small group of survivors had fought their way clear of the Mitzi Harlan debacle. The escape routing out of Millsport had held up.
They were ready to come and get us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As we steered into the village harbor and I looked around me, the sense of déjà vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.
I could almost see myself.
Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.
It didn’t. But it was the same loosely gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline, and the same working harbor complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big oceangoing rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances. Men did not.
“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.
We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in
the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago, Boubin Islander’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in at any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags, and headed up the main street. It was a slow process—Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up, too.
No one spoke to us.
We found the village’s only hotel, overlooking the main square, and booked rooms for a week, using two pristine ID datachips from among the selection we’d brought with us from Vchira. As women, Tres and Makita were our charges and didn’t rate ID procedure of their own. A scarfed and robed receptionist nonetheless greeted them with a warmth that, when I explained that my aged aunt had suffered a hip injury, became solicitous enough to be a problem. I snapped down an offer of a visit from the local woman’s doctor, and the receptionist retreated before the display of male authority. Lips tight, she busied herself with running our ID. From the window beside her desk, you could look down into the square and see the raised platform and fixing points for the community’s punishment chair. I stared bleakly down at it for a moment, then locked myself back into the present. We handprinted for access on an antique scanner and went up to our rooms.
“You have something against these people?” Makita asked me, stripping off her head garb in the room. “You seem angry. Is this why you’re pursuing a vendetta against their priests?”
“It’s related.”
“I see.” She shook out her hair, pushed fingers up through it, and regarded the cloth-and-metal masking system in her other hand with a quizzical curiosity at odds with the blunt distaste Sylvie Oshima had shown when forced to wear a scarf in Tekitomura. “Why under three moons would anybody choose to wear something like this?”
I shrugged. “It’s not the most stupid thing I’ve seen human beings commit themselves to.”
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