“So you tracked me across Newpest and the Expanse as well.”
Another humorless smile. “My home turf, Micky. And besides, that skimmer you took left a soup wake I could have followed blindfolded. Guy I hired got your ride on the radar pulling into Kem Point. I was there by nightfall, but you’d gone.”
“Yeah. So why the fuck didn’t you come knock on my cabin door while you had the chance, aboard Haiduci’s Daughter?”
She scowled. “How about because I didn’t trust you?”
“All right.”
“Yeah, and while we’re on the subject how about I still don’t? How about you explain what the fuck you’ve done with Sylvie?”
I sighed.
“Got anything to drink?”
“You tell me. You’re the one broke into my room.”
Somewhere inside me something shifted, and I suddenly understood how happy I was to see her. I couldn’t work out if it was the biological tie of the Eishundo sleeves, remembrance of the month’s snappish-ironic camaraderie in New Hok, or just the change from Brasil’s suddenly serious born-again revolutionaries. I looked at her standing there and it was like the gust of an Andrassy Sea breeze through the room.
“Good to see you again, Jad.”
“Yeah, you, too,” she admitted.
• • •
When I’d laid it all out for her, it was dark outside. Jad got up and squeezed past me in the narrow space, stood by the variable-transparency window staring out. Street lighting frosted dimly in the gloomed glass. Raised voices floated up, some kind of drunken argument.
“You sure it was her you talked to?”
“Pretty sure. I don’t think this Nadia, whoever she is, whatever she is, I don’t think she could run the command software. Certainly not well enough to generate an illusion that coherent.”
Jad nodded to herself.
“Yeah, that Renouncer shit was always going to catch up with Sylvie someday. Fuckers get you that young, you never really shake it off. So what about this Nadia thing? You really think she’s a personality mine? ’Cause I got to say, Micky, in nearly three years of tracking around New Hok, I never saw or heard of a datamine that carried that much detail, that much depth.”
I hesitated, feeling around the edges of Envoy-intuited awareness for a gist that could be stamped into something as crude as words.
“I don’t know. I think she’s, I don’t know, some kind of spec designation weapon. Everything points to Sylvie getting infected in the Uncleared. You were there for Iyamon Canyon, right?”
“Yeah. She flaked in an engagement. She was sick for weeks after. Orr tried to pretend it was just postop blues, but anyone could see different.”
“And before that, she was fine?”
“Well, she was a deCom head, that’s not a job that leans toward fine. But all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up at sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon, yeah.”
“Sites someone else had worked?”
“Yeah, you know.” In the reflection of the window, the irritation flared on her face like matchglow, then guttered out as suddenly. “No, come to think of it, you don’t, you weren’t around for any of those.”
“Any of what?”
“Ah, handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other.”
Something from my first meeting with Kurumaya snapped into focus. Sylvie wheedling, the camp commander’s impassive responses.
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 had already been trashed? We lit out, because there was nothing fucking there.
I frowned as the new fragment slid into place. Smooth and snug, like a fucking splinter. Distress radiated out through the theories I was building. It didn’t fit with any of what I was starting to believe.
“Sylvie said something about it when we went to get the cleanup duty. Kurumaya ramped you and when you got to the assigned location, there was nothing but wreckage.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Wasn’t the only time it happened, either. We ran across the same thing in the Uncleared a few times.”
“You never talked about this when I was around.”
“Yeah, well, deCom.” Jad pulled a sour face at herself in the window. “For people with heads full of state-of-the-art tech, we’re a superstitious bunch of fuckers. Not considered cool to talk about stuff like that. Brings bad luck.”
“So let me get this straight. This mimint suicide stuff, that dated from after Iyamon as well.”
“Near as I remember, yeah. So you going to tell me about this spec weapon theory of yours?”
I shook my head, juggling the new data. “I’m not sure. I think she was designed to trigger this genetic Harlan killer. I don’t think the Black Brigades abandoned their weapon, I don’t think they got exterminated before they could set it off. I think they built this thing as the initial trigger and hid it in New Hok, a personality casing with a programmed will to set off the weapon. She believes she’s Quellcrist Falconer, because that gives her the drive. But that’s all it is, a propulsion system. When it comes to the crunch, setting off a genetic curse in people who weren’t even born when it was conceived, she behaves like a completely different person, because in the end it’s the target that matters.”
Jad shrugged. “Sounds exactly like every political leader I ever heard of anyway. Ends and means, you know. Why should Quellcrist Falconer be any fucking different?”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” A curious, unlooked-for resistance to her cynicism dragging through me. I looked at my hands. “You look at Quell’s life, most of what she did bears out her philosophy, you know. Even this copy of her, or whatever it is, even she can’t make her own actions fit with what she thinks she is. She’s confused about her own motivations.”
“So? Welcome to the human fucking race.”
There was a bitter edge on the words that made me glance up. Jad was still at the window, staring at her reflected face.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said gently.
She didn’t look at me, didn’t look away. “Maybe not. But I know what I felt, and it wasn’t enough. This fucking sleeve has changed me. It cut me out of the net loop—”
“Which saved your life.”
An impatient shake of her shaven head. “It stopped me feeling with the others, Micky. It locked me out. It even changed things with Ki, you know. We never felt the same about each other that last month.”
“That’s quite common with resleeving. People learn to—”
“Oh, yeah, I know.” Now she turned away from the image of herself and stared at me. “A relationship is not easy, a relationship is work. We both tried, tried harder than we ever had before. Harder than we ever had to before. That’s the problem. Before, we didn’t have to try. I was wet for her just looking at her sometimes. It was all either of us needed, a touch, a look. That fucking went, all of it.”
I said nothing. There are times when there is nothing you can usefully say. All you can do is listen, wait, and watch as this stuff comes out. Hope that it’s a purge.
“When I heard her scream,” Jad said, with difficulty. “It was like, it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter enough. I didn’t feel it enough to stay and fight. In my own body, I would have stayed and fought.”
“Stayed and died, you mean.”
A careless shrug, a flinching away like tears.
“This is crabshit, Jad. It’s the guilt talking because you survived. You tell yourself this but there’s nothing you could have done, and you know it.”
She looked at me then, and she was crying
, quiet ribbons of tears and a smeared grimace.
“What the fuck do you know about it, Micky? It’s just another fucking version of you that did this to us. You’re a fucking destroyer, an ex-Envoy burnout. You were never deCom. You never belonged, you don’t know what it was like to be a part of that. How close it was. You don’t know what it feels like to lose that.”
Briefly, my mind fled back to the Corps and Virginia Vidaura. The rage after Innenin. It was the last time I’d really belonged to anything, well over a century gone. I’d felt twinges of the same thing after, the fresh growth of comradeship and united purpose—and I’d ripped it up by the roots every time. That shit will get you killed. Get you used.
“So,” I said, brutally casual. “Now you’ve tracked me down. Now you know. What are you going to do about it?”
She wiped tears from her face with hard strokes that were almost blows.
“I want to see her,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Jad had a small, battered skimmer she’d hired in Kem Point. It was parked under harsh security lighting on a rental ramp at the back of the hostel. We went out to it, collecting a cheery wave from the girl on reception, who seemed to have derived a touching delight from her role in our successful reunion. Jad coded the locks on the sliding roof, clambered behind the wheel, and spun us rapidly out into the dark of the Expanse. As the glimmer of lights from the Strip shrank behind us, she tore off the beard again and gave me the wheel while she stripped off her robes.
“Yeah, why wrap yourself up like that?” I asked her. “What was the point?”
She shrugged. “Cover. I figured I had the yak looking for me at least, and I still didn’t know what your end was, who you were playing for. Best to stay cloaked. Everywhere you go, people tend to leave the Beards alone.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, even the cops.” She lifted the ocher surplice over her head. “Funny stuff, religion. No one wants to talk to a priest.”
“Especially one who might declare you an enemy of God for the way you cut your hair.”
“Well, yeah, that too I guess. Anyway, I got some novelty shop in Kem Point to make up the stuff, told them it was for a beach party. And you know what, it works. No one talks to me. Plus.” She freed herself from the rest of the robes with accustomed ease and jabbed a thumb at the mimint-killer shard gun strapped under her arm. “Makes great cover for the hardware.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“You lugged that fucking cannon all the way down here? What were you planning to do, splatter me across the Expanse with it?”
She gave me a sober look. Under the straps of the holster, her deCom T-shirt was printed with the words CAUTION: SMART MEAT WEAPON SYSTEM.
“Maybe,” she said, and turned away to stow her disguise at the back of the tiny cabin.
• • •
Navigating the Expanse at night isn’t much fun when you’re driving a rental with the radar capacity of a child’s toy. Both Jad and I were Newpest natives, and we’d seen enough skimmer wrecks growing up to throttle back and take it slow. It didn’t help that Hotei was still down and mounting cloud shrouded Daikoku at the horizon. There was a commercial traffic lane for the tourist buses, illuminum marker buoys marching off into the weed-fragrant night, but it wasn’t much help. Segesvar’s place was a long way off the standard routes. Within half an hour the buoys had faded out of sight and we were alone with the scant coppery light of a high-flung, speeding Marikanon.
“Peaceful out here,” Jad said, as if making the discovery for the first time.
I grunted and wheeled us left as the skimmer’s lights picked out a sprawl of tepes root ahead. The outermost branches scraped loudly on the metal of the skirt as we passed. Jad winced.
“Maybe we should have waited for morning.”
I shrugged. “Go back if you like.”
“No, I think—”
The radar blipped.
We both looked at the console, then at each other. The reported presence blipped again, louder.
“Maybe a bale freighter,” I said.
“Maybe.” But there was a hardened deCom dislike in her face as she watched the signal build.
I killed the forward drives and waited as the skimmer coasted to a gentle halt on the murmur of lift stabilizers. The scent of weed pressed inward. I stood up and leaned on the edge of the opened roof panels. Faintly, along with the smells of the Expanse, the breeze carried the sound of motors approaching.
I dropped back into the body of the cockpit.
“Jad, I think you’d better take the artillery and get up near the tail. Just in case.”
She nodded curtly and gestured for me to give her some space. I backed up and she swung herself effortlessly up onto the roof, then freed the shard blaster from its webbing holster. She glanced down at me.
“Fire control?”
I thought for a moment, then pumped the stabilizers. The murmuring of the lift system rose to a sustained growl, then sank back.
“Like that. You hear that, you shoot up everything in sight.”
“ ’Kay.”
Her feet scuffed on the superstructure, heading aft. I stood up again and watched as she settled into the cover of the skimmer’s tail assembly, then turned my attention back to the closing signal. The radar set was a bare-minimum insurance-necessity installation, and it gave no detail beyond the steadily increasing blotch on the screen. But a couple of minutes later I didn’t need it. The gaunt, turreted silhouette rose on the horizon, came plowing toward us, and might as well have had an illuminum sign pasted on its prow.
PIRATE.
Not dissimilar to a compact oceangoing hoverloader, it ran no navigation lights at all. It sat long and low on the surface of the Expanse, but bulked with crude plate armoring and weapons pods custom-welded to the original structure. I cranked neurachem vision and got the vague sense of figures moving about in low red lighting behind the glass panels at the nose, but no activity near the guns. As the vessel loomed and turned broadside to me, I saw lateral scrape marks in the metal of the skirt. Legacy of all the engagements that had ended in hull-to-hull boarding assault.
A spotlight snapped on and panned across me, then switched back and held. I held up my hand against the glare. Neurachem squeezed a view of silhouettes in a snub conning tower atop the pirate’s forward cabin. A young male voice, cranked tense with chemicals, floated across the soupy water.
“You Kovacs?”
“I’m Serendipity. What do you want?”
A dry, mirthless cackle. “Serendipity. Well, I just guess you fucking are. Serendipitous to the max from where I’m standing.”
“I asked you a question.”
“What do I want. Heard you. Well, what I want, first and foremost, I want your slim pal back there at the stern to stand down and put her hardware away. We’ve got her on infrared anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to turn her into panther feed with the vibe gun, but then you’d be upset, right?”
I said nothing.
“See, and you upset gets me nowhere. Supposed to keep you happy, Kovacs. Bring you along, but keep you happy. So your pal stands down, I’m happy, no need for fireworks and gore, you’re happy, you come along with me, people I work for are happy, they treat me right, I get even happier. Know what that’s called, Kovacs? That’s a virtuous circle.”
“Want to tell me who the people you work for are?”
“Well, yeah, I want to, obviously, but there’s just no way I can, see. Under contract, not a word to pass my lips about that shit till you’re at the table and doing the something-for-you, something-for-me boogie. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to take all of this on trust.”
Or be blasted apart trying to leave.
I sighed and turned to the stern.
“Come on out, Jad.”
There was a long pause, and then she emerged from the shadows of the tail assembly, shard blaster hanging at her side. I still had the neurachem up, and the look o
n her face said she’d rather have fought it out.
“That’s much better,” called the pirate cheerfully. “Now we’re all friends.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
His name was Vlad Tepes, named apparently not for the vegetation but after some dimly remembered folk hero from precolonial times. He was lanky and pale, wearing flesh like some cheap, young shaven-headed version of Jack Soul Brasil they’d thrown out at prototype stage. Flesh that something told me was his own, his first sleeve, in which case he wasn’t much older than Isa had been. There were acne scars on his cheeks that he fingered occasionally, and he trembled from head to foot with tetrameth overload. He overgestured and laughed too much, and at some point in his young life he’d had the bone of his skull opened at the temples and filled with jagged lightning-flash sections of purple-black alloy cement. The stuff glinted in the low light aboard the pirate vessel as he moved about, and when you looked at him head-on it gave his face a faintly demonic aspect that was obviously what was intended. The men and women around him on the bridge gave ground with alacrity to his jerky, meth-driven motion, and respect read out in their eyes as they watched him.
The radical surgery aside, he reminded me of Segesvar and myself at that age, so much that it ached.
The vessel, perhaps predictably, rejoiced in the name Impaler, and it ran due west at speed, trampling imperiously through obstacles smaller and less armored skimmers would have needed to go around.
“Got to,” Vlad informed us succinctly as something crunched under the armored skirt. “Everyone’s been looking for you on the Strip, and not very well is my guess, ’cause they didn’t find you, did they. Hah! Anyway, wasted a fuck of a lot of time that way and my clients, they seem pushed temporally, if you know what I mean.”
On the identity of the clients, he remained steadfastly closemouthed, which, on that much meth, is no mean feat.
“Look, be there soon, anyway,” he jittered, face twitching. “Why worry?”
In this at least, he was telling the truth. Barely an hour after we’d been taken aboard, Impaler slowed and drifted cautiously broadside toward a decayed ruin of a baling station in the middle of nowhere. The pirate’s coms officer ran a series of scrambled interrogation protocols, and whoever was inside the ruined station had a machine that knew the code. The coms woman looked up and nodded. Vlad stood glitter-eyed before his instrument displays and snapped instructions like insults. Impaler picked up a little lateral speed again, fired grapple lines into the evercrete dock pilings with a series of splintering smacks, and then cranked itself in tight. Green lights and a gangplank extended.
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